Peter Tieryas – Tor.comhttps://www.tor.com
Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.
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1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1.1Video Game Horror Doesn’t Get Much Better Than Silent Hill 4: The Roomhttps://www.tor.com/2018/10/26/video-game-horror-doesnt-get-much-better-than-silent-hill-4-the-room/
https://www.tor.com/2018/10/26/video-game-horror-doesnt-get-much-better-than-silent-hill-4-the-room/#commentsFri, 26 Oct 2018 17:30:22 +0000https://www.tor.com/?p=404768Silent Hill 4: The Room—released in 2004 for PlayStation 2 and the Xbox—is the best Silent Hill game after the second one and one of the most original horror games ever developed. If SH4 hadn’t been part of the Silent Hill series, it’d probably be considered one of the most unique games in the genre. […]]]>

Silent Hill 4: The Room—released in 2004 for PlayStation 2 and the Xbox—is the best Silent Hill game after the second one and one of the most original horror games ever developed. If SH4 hadn’t been part of the Silent Hill series, it’d probably be considered one of the most unique games in the genre. Part of what makes it so distinct is that it goes against the formula of what we’d come to expect of the series. Many gamers, including myself, were initially turned off by how drastically it had changed. But once the expectations faded, a horrifying experience awaited, unrelenting in its oppressive terror.

Room 302

A big part of why most of the recent Silent Hill games have been underwhelming is because they tried to outdo what was essentially narrative perfection in Silent Hill 2. The story is a trek through madness, guilt, and personal horror projected subconsciously into some of the most gruesome monsters ever seen. The climax is both revolting and satisfying, a narrative twist that makes the jigsaw puzzle of Sunderland’s journey a Rosetta Stone of death.

As much as I enjoyed parts of Homecoming, Downpour, SH3, and Origins, they felt more or less the same games, only rehashed. In short, protagonist has issues in Silent Hill, an evil cult causes a whole lot of trouble, and we wish we’d never entered the hellishly foggy suburbia. Revelations uncover a dark past that can be resolved in a number of different ways. Awesome sound effects and music from Akira Yamaoka (and Daniel Licht for Downpour and Memories) scare the crap out of us. Occasionally, a UFO reveals its grand machination to take over the world. Rinse and repeat.

SH4 began as a side story with loose connections to the series before becoming a full-fledged sequel. Because of its tangential origins, Team Silent was able to experiment and innovate on some of the core ideas in the series, sometimes scrapping them altogether. The Room’s biggest achievement is that it makes mundane, every day living, horrifying. At least with the previous three Silent Hill games, I felt like I was transported to a place that was far away, a slice of American life seen through the prism of Japanese developers.

SH4 brought the terror home. Henry Townshend is stuck inside of his own apartment and can’t leave. To highlight the feeling of familiarity, all the sequences in the apartment are in first person mode. It’s you who’s chained in and taken captive with no explicable reason. A claustrophobic atmosphere pervades and in the tight space you call your apartment, there’s no food, the phone is disconnected, and the television is shut off. It also didn’t help that the first time I played SH4, I lived in an Apt. #304, just two doors away from the game’s Room 302.

The voyeurism of spying on your neighbor and the people across from you, a la Hitchcock’s Rear Window, is both creepy and addicting. You can look out the window and see people going about their lives, all of them oblivious to what you’re going through. One of the most disturbing interactions I had didn’t even revert to the typical scare tactics most games use—you know, gory monsters and agonizing shrieks punctuated by alarming music. Rather, it takes place mostly in “silence.”

Alerted by neighbors, the superintendent checks up on your room, knocking on the front door, even using the spare key to try to enter. He is unable to get past the chains and despite your pleas for help, he can’t hear a thing. He eventually writes you a note and slips it under the door. When you look at it, it’s covered in blood, undecipherable. The superintendent then murmurs how reminiscent this is of the last time, and I’m thinking, what last time and what in the world happened to the slip? For the next few peeps out your front door, you’ll see him standing in the hallway, troubled, unable to articulate his fears. Just by staring at his troubled, polygonal face, powerless to help yet knowing what awaited me, I felt terror. Not only was aid from the outside world going to be impossible, but the dude outside pretty much knew I was screwed.

The game’s protagonist, Henry Townshend, is bland and generic. He has no connection to the villain, no demons that need exorcising. Unlike the previous Silent Hills, the monsters aren’t projections of the hero’s subconscious fears and guilts. It might seem like a major negative, but Henry is designed as a projection of the gamer, a blank avatar that just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. By trade, he’s a photographer, which is the perfect profession for a main character whose principal purpose is to observe and understand. At times, the voyeurism verges on the perverse, and it’s an odd way of embodying the sacrament of “wisdom.” His journey through the womb-like tunnels signify a ghastly rebirth. What’s most fascinating is the void in Townshend’s personality allows the main arc to center around the serial killer, Walter Sullivan, whose nightmarish wonderland we’re sucked into via the toilet hole from hell. Each of his victims populates these ghoulish bubble worlds, encapsulated and scarred by Silent Hill’s signature cult, The Order. The deadliest of these worlds is the Water Prison and a great example of what makes SH4 so good.

The Water Prison

A panopticon is conceptually one of the most efficient prison systems conceivable. A single watchman sits in the middle of a circular prison and observes all the cells around him. The inspection house has a one-way mirror into each room so that none of the prisoners know who is being watched at any given moment. It’s intended to produce paranoia, insecurity, and dread.

SH4’s Water Prison is a panopticon used by the Order to control the orphans it had under its care. It’s also a symbolic projection of Sullivan and his relationship to his victims, all of whom he is keeping tabs on. Sullivan was tortured here as a child, and his friend, Bob, disappeared at the hands of Andrew DeSalvo, a guard in the prison. As Townshend navigates the arcane spirals of the tower, he begins to understand the inhuman events that took place there. Most of these revelations come from notes he uncovers, some nonchalantly describing gruesome acts, others from orphans who are going mad. From the bloody beds and the holes built to efficiently dispose of corpses, to the brutal torture hall in the basement, this branch of the Silent Hill Smile Support Society was anything but a happy place for its inhabitants.

The first visit to the prison is relatively harmless. There are very few foes, though the Twin Victim monsters make their debut here as the conjoined reincarnation of Sullivan’s 7th and 8th victim (their baby faces clash in innocence and agony, making for a ghoulish coupling). The puzzles aren’t very difficult either (spinning the tower floors to line up the death pits). But it’s the way the story is so integrated into the architecture that makes this part so unnerving. Up until then, many of the creepiest settings in the SH games were rusted, industrial versions of their counterparts in the light world. They were scary, but more because they looked like hell factories enshrouded in night, decay, and headless mannequins. In SH4, the Water Prison isn’t set in a dark, twisted parallel universe, but is based on reality. Children were being tortured there in the most horrendous ways. The scariest part is that it feels like a believable place, grounded in the history of actual prison sites (the whole idea of a panopticon was philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s way of trying to devise a jail system that was more cost-effective). Human behavior at its worst is incomparably more diabolical than monsters at their most villainous. The atmosphere exudes with palpable suffering, giving us intimations of the tragedy of Sullivan’s past.

The whole prison has the psychological effect in turning the tables against DeSalvo. Rather than the pity or sympathy we feel when we first see him begging for his life outside his prison door, he begins to elicit disgust. Sullivan, the serial killer, actually becomes a sympathetic figure. When DeSalvo is found dead in the torture room, I’m willing to bet few gamers shed tears. It’s a labyrinthine allegory of Sullivan’s mind that’s making our own judgement just as murky. You literally need to shine a light all the way to the depths to complete the sequence.

19/21

The second half of the game has received a lot of criticism and is the biggest reason the game is maligned by fans. In part, it’s because you have to revisit all the levels while escorting Eileen, who has arguably some of the worst AI in gaming. But it’s also because the difficulty level makes a sudden spike into almost nauseating painfulness. Towing the line between being frustrating and challenging is one of the toughest balancing acts designers face.

I thought Team Silent did a great job in inducing a sense of helplessness, a motif that permeates the game. I haven’t felt this vulnerable in a Silent Hill game, or any other horror game outside of Amnesia, since. You sprint from one area to the next, Eileen limping next to you. She is not only easy prey for the enemies, but you can damage her as well. At times, this can be trying, especially since you’re unable to permanently ward off the invincible ghosts without one of the rare swords. But it also forces you to plan out your approach and get a good sense of the layout.

While the levels are recycled, each of them has new camera angles, making them feel like different locations. The unsettling perspective often precludes your front view, making the sudden appearance of monsters startling. The worlds are connected by stairs that are somewhat like the umbilical cord tying the tragedy together, and the maddening cohesion gives you a deeper appreciation for the geographical manifestation of Sullivan’s tattered psyche. In many of the other Silent Hill games, the best tactic is to run away from enemies, sprinting through the danger zones without really being able to soak them in. That isn’t the case with SH4.

In the second visit to the Building World, there’s a pet store where a brutal massacre took place. The first time through, I pretty much forgot it. The second time though, three ghosts ambush you between the shelves and the changing camera angles make it feel like the store itself is trying to kill you. When you uncover its dark past through newspapers on the ground and you hear the echoes of the bullets that destroyed it, it all clicks. Sullivan’s mind isn’t just channeling his own suffering, but those around him as well.

Personalization is an important aspect of the game. The most difficult ghosts you face are the people you saw get killed by Sullivan earlier, giving you a morbid sense of connection to them. I was still wracked by guilt that I hadn’t been able to save one of the victims, Cynthia, in the subway station. Later, she unleashes a Bayonetta styled hair attack that sucks you dry as she pursues you from one train to the other. I hated their presence, but at the same time, understood why they were so raving mad in the afterlife.

Eileen’s mental states begins to deteriorate as she gets hurt by all the ghosts. But what’s more interesting is that she can’t be killed. Usually, escort missions are so annoying because your companions need constant rescuing before they die. In SH4, her damage level only impacts the ending you’ll get. You can completely neglect her, or take pains to prevent her from taking any hits. She’s another layer in the psychological Rorschach of your gameplay and her state is a reflection of your own attitude towards her. It also mirrors Walter’s relationship with his parents, a disturbing thread to say the least.

You can’t ever let your guard down as SH4 will leave you breathless, panicked, and anxious.

A maniacal Walter Sullivan only exacerbates the situation, taunting you with a chainsaw throughout the levels, impervious to your attacks. At least you can tunnel your way back and find solace in your apartment…

Actually, scrap that. Your apartment becomes haunted. The disintegration happens at a slow crawl and ends in a torturous avalanche. Your room no longer heals you and will at times drain your energy. Windows shake, a blood-drenched apparition of yourself appears in your peephole, a ghost tries to break into your apartment, Robbie the Rabbit is staring at you with blood on his cheeks, and angry doll babies haunt your item box (damn you Sullivan for giving me that Shabby Doll!). There is no haven, no escape. The terror becomes ubiquitous.

21 Sacraments

I’ll admit, when I first started The Room, I had lots of reservations. I was confused the game had strayed so far from the best in the series. Even the character models did not seem as haunting or graphically visceral as the ones in the first three. Silent Hill 2 was not only one of my favorite horror games, but one of the best gaming experiences I’d ever had. In fact, about a decade ago, one of the main reasons I decided to leave LucasArts for EA was so I could work with the art director and principal designer of Silent Hill 2, Sato Takayoshi, who had left Konami after SH2. Here was the man who’d taken what might be considered the drawbacks of the uncanny valley and made it into a distinctive style. His attention to detail was inspiring and his insights into the mythos of Silent Hill 2, as well as game design in general, helped me to understand gaming in a very different light. I didn’t think SH2 could ever be topped.

The moment my perspective on that changed was when I was in my real living room (#304, remember) after playing The Room. It was late and I heard my neighbors talking right outside my apartment door. I got creeped out and checked the peephole. I didn’t recognize them. Who were they? What were they talking about? Were they conspiring against me? I was mixing up the horror of SH4’s eponymous room with my own in real life.

I began to appreciate the game for its own merits rather than wondering why it wasn’t another retread of James Sunderland and Heather Mason’s journey. As I looked at all the elements in play, from the grim radio broadcasts, to the needling sound whenever a ghost approaches, to the seemingly interminable escalator ride in the train station, and the panoply of surreal hospital rooms, I realized SH4 paid tribute to the series without being bound by it. There were genuine terrors that had me sweating with fear. Not even Silent Hill 2 had me terrified of my own apartment. And while Sunderland’s personal revelation at the end of SH2 is one of the most shocking twists in gaming, SH4’s surprise “room” is pretty damn appalling too, capturing both the madness of Sullivan, as well as the insane extent to which he’ll go to be with his mother again.

With the news that P.T./Silent Hills is canceled, or at least put on hold, I’ve wondered what direction the series will go if it ever picks back up. A big reason people were so thrilled by P.T. was because it changed the formula so much, even incorporating aspects that many gamers felt were reminiscent of SH4. If the Silent Hill series ever does come back from the dead, I hope they’ll follow in the spirit of The Room, innovating and trying out new ways to terrify gamers instead of clinging to the previous tenets of the Silent Hill formula like they were sacrosanct. Until then, you’ll find me sleeping with all the lights on, wondering what the strange noises coming from my bathroom are.

Originally published in October 2015

Peter Tieryas is the author of Mecha Samurai Empire and United States of Japan, which won Japan’s top SF award, the Seiun. He’s written for Kotaku, S-F Magazine, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He’s also been a technical writer for LucasArts, a VFX artist at Sony, and currently works in feature animation. He tweets @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2018/10/26/video-game-horror-doesnt-get-much-better-than-silent-hill-4-the-room/feed/7How Cordwainer Smith’s Work Influenced the Writing of Mecha Samurai Empirehttps://www.tor.com/2018/09/19/how-cordwainer-smiths-work-influenced-the-writing-of-mecha-samurai-empire/
https://www.tor.com/2018/09/19/how-cordwainer-smiths-work-influenced-the-writing-of-mecha-samurai-empire/#commentsWed, 19 Sep 2018 14:00:32 +0000https://www.tor.com/?p=393239My relationship with Cordwainer Smith’s work began in high school thanks to my 11th grade AP English teacher, Mr. Hom. I grew up in an abusive family and I hated going home, so I used to stay after school as long as I could, talking with my teacher about the weird worlds of literature. He […]]]>

My relationship with Cordwainer Smith’s work began in high school thanks to my 11th grade AP English teacher, Mr. Hom. I grew up in an abusive family and I hated going home, so I used to stay after school as long as I could, talking with my teacher about the weird worlds of literature.

He introduced me to many of my favorite literary works, from the musings on philosophy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to the maniacal defiance of godhood in Moby-Dick, as well as the suppressive thought police of 1984. But the writer that stands out most was one I’d never heard of before: Cordwainer Smith.

Mr. Hom would tell me all sorts of fantastic stories about the Instrumentality, how Smith was influenced by his time growing up China (his godfather was Sun Yat-Sen, the founding father of the Republic of China), and the unique way he incorporated Asian myth and culture in a way that had rarely been done before. The idea of there existing science fiction incorporating Asian elements was so appealing to me, especially because there weren’t any writers of Asian descent I knew who wrote science fiction back then. What was odd was that I’d never heard of Smith and couldn’t find his books at the local Borders (back when it still existed) or Barnes and Noble. I wasn’t familiar with Amazon yet either. Because I had such a hard time finding his books, a part of me even wondered if my teacher had written the stories himself and was using Cordwainer Smith as an avatar for his own ideas.

But that’s when used bookstores came to the rescue. There were four local bookstores I loved visiting, musty old places that were filled with stacks of used science fiction paperbacks. It felt like I’d entered into an ancient hub with these books, their weird and almost grindhouse style covers bright with gaudy hues, their spines in a frail state that would break apart if you weren’t careful. I quickly learned these strange books were portals to fantastic worlds at $2-$5 apiece, a treasure trove of strange and bizarre realities. The booksellers always had great recommendations and when I asked about Cordwainer Smith, I remember the excitement and surprise I was met with as they considered Smith special, although somewhat obscure for general readers.

Even with access to the used bookstores, his stories were hard to track down and it was an ecstatic moment when I finally found his collection, The Best of Cordwainer Smith. I immediately jumped into the first story without waiting to go home, reading, “Scanners Live In Vain” at the bookstore.

The strangeness of the story struck me, where the titular Scanners cut off all sensory input to the brain except for their eyes and live in a cruel, dehumanized existence in order to survive the “Great Pain of Space” in interstellar travel. “The brain is cut from the heart, the lungs. The brain is cut from the ears, the nose. The brain is cut from the mouth, the belly. The brain is cut from desire, and pain. The brain is cut from the world,” Smith explained.

It was a humanity completely split apart from itself, a forced isolation in the future where even the assemblage of a human was carved into separate divisions to serve others. The symbolic slavehood was the ultimate act of numbing, manipulating science just so the Scanners could endure. It was something I could relate to as I’d emotionally split myself apart in order to better deal with some of the more difficult aspects of my life.

Even more disturbing was the fact that when a new technology is discovered that would make their seemingly terrible function obsolete, the Scanners react defensively and try to eliminate the invention. Protecting the status quo and maintaining authority takes precedence for them, even if it would greatly improve and benefit their lives. They ultimately vote against their own self-interests in a misguided attempt at preserving their terrible plight.

High school often felt like it was a cluster of different sects and cliques maintaining their hold over their various domains while we were enslaved to a codified system that categorized us within the school walls. Like the Scanners, the cliques had their own rituals and quaint beliefs, and would do anything to protect them. In the short story, one of the Scanners who remains “cranched” by having his senses reconnected is the only one to realize that this new invention needs to be implemented, causing him to defy the other Scanners. Smith’s characters are often about outsiders looking in with different perspectives.

I related to that view and kept reading when I took the collection home. Stories like “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal,” “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” and “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” all had intriguing titles with equally fascinating premises behind them. Each of them was connected by the “Instrumentality,” a different type of government that believed in the harmonization of power while overseeing groups like the Scanners. It wasn’t a structure that imposed their will on people, but rather a council of individuals who help move humanity as a whole forward.

I was thrilled to share my discoveries with my teacher, Mr. Hom. I’d find a few more collections of Smith’s work and devour them. I was especially surprised to learn that one of my favorite Chinese novels growing up, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, influenced the structure and style of some of the stories. My teacher and I used to spend hours after school analysing and dissecting what made Smith’s works so powerful. I was short on role models and as I mentioned, I dreaded going home. My long talks with Mr. Hom were a chance for me to imagine different worlds and try to make sense of the random violence that awaited me. I’d always loved writing, but it was under his guidance that I really began finding my voice and channeling characters that defy terrible circumstances through imagination and a desire to endure.

Buy it Now

Many years later, when it came time to writing my own science fiction book about students aspiring to be mecha cadets (the new standalone book in the United States of Japan universe, Mecha Samurai Empire), I thought back on my high school years. I wasn’t a straight-A student and while I loved English and history, there were lots of subjects I struggled with (it didn’t help that I spent a lot of my time reading newly discovered science fiction and fantasy books in class by hiding them behind my textbooks). But still, I dreamed of being a writer.

In that same way, the main protagonist, Mac, struggles just to keep afloat at school. He doesn’t have a rich family, doesn’t have any realistic hopes of making something of his life; instead, he takes solace in mecha-related games (just as I did in books and videogames back then). As corporal punishment is part of school life, Mac and his friends do their best to avoid beatings at school. But he keeps persisting because of his dream of becoming a mecha pilot. He represents an intentional defiance of the trope of a prodigious and gifted orphan finding success through their rare talent, even against intense opposition. All the main characters struggle through with grit, persistence, and a whole lot of suffering. They’re fighting the odds to drive mechas, even if they’re not the most gifted pilots around.

It was important to me to incorporate the same sense of wonder and excitement that I had discovering the worlds of Cordwainer Smith into the high school students of Mecha Samurai Empire as they learn more about mecha piloting. There are direct tributes to Smith, like experimental programs try to get mecha pilots to neurally interface directly with their cats (an idea explored in “The Game of Rat and Dragon”) and the fact that one of the mecha scientists is named Dr. Shimitsu (for Smith). I also thought of the elaborate rituals the Scanners had when devising the lore and culture of the mecha pilots. There are references to events that are never explained in Smith’s stories, wars that are never elaborated upon but that hint at so much and provide fodder for the curious. There’s one scene in Mecha Samurai Empire where the cadets get together in an initiation ceremony far below the depths of Berkeley Academy. One of the senior cadets discusses their past which is a tribute to the lessons I learned from Smith’s worldbuilding:

“Welcome to the Shrine of the Twelve Disciples. We are deep underneath Berkeley in this sacred shrine where only members of the mecha corps and the priests have access. The first twelve mechas and their pilots were called the Twelve Disciples for their devotion to the ideals and principles of the Emperor. They risked everything for the preservation of the United States of Japan. The Disciples were six women and six men, representing multiple ethnicities, united under the banner of the rising sun… Many questioned the Disciples, particularly the other branches, who were jealous. But after the Twelve Disciples fought back the horde of Nazis who wanted America for themselves and died in those battles to save the USJ, all opposition faded. Posthumously, the Emperor granted each of the Disciples a position in the great Shinto pantheon.”

Carved into the walls are Japanese letters describing the exploits of the Disciples, their backgrounds, what they achieved in battle. Each of their pilot suits is in an airtight glass display case. Painted on the ground is the emblem of an armored fox, snarling defiantly, ready to pounce on its prey. There is also a whole gallery devoted to their feats painted by the famous Hokkaido artist, Igarashi from his G-Sol Studios. His artistry is phenomenal, and I gawk at the treasure trove of our legacy.

Looking back all these years later, science fiction for me wasn’t just an escape from reality. It was a way for me to cope and find a different, more nuanced meaning in what seemed like the random cruelty of the world. I was similar to one of the Scanners, cutting off different parts of myself emotionally from each other so I wouldn’t feel the pain all at once. The new tech that brought relief and change was writing.

Making me feel especially happy is that kids growing up now have so many wonderful and inspiring Asian writers and voices in the SF and fantasy space to read, from Ken Liu to Zen Cho, Aliette de Bodard, Wes Chu, JY Yang, R.F. Kuang, and more. Even if scanners live in vain, at least they won’t have to feel alone.

I don’t remember many of the things I studied in high school, what I learned in all those sleepless nights preparing for AP exams, and sadly enough, even the majority of my friends back then. But I do remember reading Cordwainer Smith for the first time and being awestruck at his storytelling as I talked with my teacher about what made his work so great. After the painful partitions I’d set up for myself, it was part of what would eventually help make me whole again.

Peter Tieryas is the author of Mecha Samurai Empire and United States of Japan, which won Japan’s top SF award, the Seiun. He’s written for Kotaku, S-F Magazine, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He’s also been a technical writer for LucasArts, a VFX artist at Sony, and currently works in feature animation. He tweets @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2018/09/19/how-cordwainer-smiths-work-influenced-the-writing-of-mecha-samurai-empire/feed/8Mecha Samurai Empirehttps://www.tor.com/2018/08/09/excerpts-mecha-samurai-empire-peter-tieryas/
https://www.tor.com/2018/08/09/excerpts-mecha-samurai-empire-peter-tieryas/#respondThu, 09 Aug 2018 19:00:45 +0000https://www.tor.com/?p=381067A United States of Japan novel. Germany and Japan won WWII and control the U.S., and a young man has one dream: to become a mecha pilot.]]>

Makoto Fujimoto grew up in California, but with a difference–his California is part of the United States of Japan. After Germany and Japan won WWII, the United States fell under their control. Growing up in this world, Mac plays portical games, haphazardly studies for the Imperial Exam, and dreams of becoming a mecha pilot. Only problem: Mac’s grades are terrible. His only hope is to pass the military exam and get into the prestigious mecha pilot training program at Berkeley Military Academy.

When his friend Hideki’s plan to game the test goes horribly wrong, Mac washes out of the military exam too. Perhaps he can achieve his dream by becoming a civilian pilot. But with tensions rising between the United States of Japan and Nazi Germany and rumors of collaborators and traitors abounding, Mac will have to stay alive long enough first…

The follow-up to United States of Japan, Peter Tieryas’ action-packed alternate history novel Mecha Samurai Empire is available September 18th from Ace Books.

I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the United States of Japan
And to the Empire
For which it stands,
Under the Emperor, indivisible,
With order and justice for all.

GRANADA HILLS1994 WINTER

I don’t know why people say time heals all wounds. Time only aggravates mine.

My maternal grandparents were Japanese citizens who lived in Kyoto and immigrated to San Francisco during the early 1900s. My paternal grandparents were ethnic Koreans who moved to Los Angeles shortly after the Empire’s victory in 1948. There were more opportunities in the United States of Japan then, especially since the Empire was rebuilding so many of the cities that were in ruins. My parents met during the 1974 Matsuri, a festival at a Shinto shrine in Irvine. My father served as a mecha technician and worked on the maintenance of their armor plating. My mother was an officer who worked as a navigator aboard the mecha Kamoshika. She recognized my dad at the shrine for the work he did on their BP generator. They each picked out an o-mikuji from the o-mikuji box, wondering what fortunes those little strips of paper foretold. By pure coincidence, both of their messages read that a momentous event would occur that day and alter their destinies forever. After sharing jokes and chiding each other about destiny and politics in the corps, they agreed to go to their favorite ramen shop for dinner.

I was born two years later.

Buy it Now

My earliest memory with them is at a mecha factory in Long Beach. The armored legs were bigger than most buildings I’d seen. By the time I was three, I was waging wars against the Nazis with mecha toys my dad had built for me. He’d made me a special jimbaori, and I loved the way the old samurai surcoats gave my mechanical warriors a regal bearing. Neither of my parents got to pilot an actual mecha even though both wished they could. Maybe they’d have gotten the chance if they’d had more time.

The greatest threat during their lives wasn’t the Germans but American terrorists who called themselves George Washingtons. The George Washingtons were rumored to be so ruthless, they’d cut off the ears of our soldiers to wear as necklaces. In 1978, hundreds of the terrorists launched themselves at the city hall in San Diego and killed thousands of our citizens. Three months later, they carried out another attack, killing many innocent civilians in the Gaslamp Quarter, including the wife of an important general.

Mom and Dad were ordered to the front in early 1980. They came back home to visit every few months, but neither of them spoke much during their years of service. My father spent most of his time brooding, and the only time I saw even a hint of affection from my mother was when she’d be humming military songs to herself. The last memory I have of them is the morning they left. They told me they’d see me in three months. I still remember the bright colors of the jacketlike haoris they wore over their kimonos and how attracted I was to the golden embroidery. We ate our breakfast in silence. My eggs were too salty, my anchovies were hard, and the pickled tsukemono smelled funny. They usually left without saying much. But that morning, my mom stopped as she was about to leave, came back inside, and gave me a kiss on the forehead.

Nineteen eighty-four was a bloody year. Lots of kids in the Empire became orphans that year. I was no exception. My parents were killed in two separate battles four days apart.

The corporal who came to tell me wept as he spoke. Mom had saved his life in battle, so he had taken the news very hard. “Your mother loved nashis,” he told me, having brought a box full of the sweet Asian pears. “She used to cut them up into small pieces to share with her whole unit, and she’d always save one piece just to show she was thinking of you.”

Concepts like life and death were hard for me to grasp at that age. Even as he told me stories about my parents, I kept on wondering when he’d go away and my parents would return. It took me a full year to realize they were never coming back, and by then, I was living with a stingy “guardian” who’d been ordered by the government to adopt me, as I had no surviving family members. His primary business had been construction with the hotels in Tijuana and San Diego, but the revolt had put an end to all that. My adoptive father insisted that my adoptive mother measure the amount of rice she was scooping for me. If I left even a little bit of food on my plate, I’d get a severe scolding for “wasting food,” which both my adoptive brothers did without a second thought.

Knowing my parents had served aboard mechas, I glorified them. I swore I would grow up to be a mecha pilot protecting the Empire against its enemies. My adoptive parents called it a pipe dream and sent me away as soon as I was eligible for boarding school, in Granada Hills within the California Province, where I’ve been for nearly a decade.

Now, with my high-school graduation coming in a few months, I practice almost every day on the mecha simulations. Like most kids who grew up in the eighties, I play portical games. The mecha simulations take place inside arcade booths that re-create visuals captured from real-life footage, with surround sound that makes the experience immersive. I wear haptic controls and drive the mecha with a simplified interface that simulates piloting. While I engage in many battles, the one I go back to most often is the fight in San Diego in which my mother was killed.

The Kamoshika was an older Kaneda-class mecha, larger but less deadly than the Torturer-class mechas that were slowly replacing them. Samurai Titan was their nickname because they were so massive. The Kamoshika was essentially a mountain-sized warrior with robotic joints and a face mask protecting its bridge in the head.

It’d been called in to investigate suspicious activity by the George Washingtons. A rebel leader calling herself Abigail Adams led a surprise attack that decimated one of our battalions. The lieutenant colonel in charge of the security station had sent an SOS before communications were cut.

Playing the sim again, I watch as our forces disconnect all electricity to that region of the city. Our soldiers switch to infrared mode, but it’s like shadow dancing as they tiptoe their way across a blackened San Diego. The terrorists fire flare guns into the sky, causing bright orbs to reveal the presence of the mecha. There is a frenzied commotion as the GWs prepare for what is designed as the ultimate trap.

They’ve gathered twenty-two Neptune Tactical Missile Launchers they obtained from the Nazis (even though the Germans would later claim they were stolen) along with five Panzer Maus IX Super-tanks. When the Kamoshika arrives at the scene, there is a simultaneous barrage. The pilot realizes it’s an ambush and has a split second when he can choose to flee. But it’s in an area full of civilians, and the Kamoshika has a sizable military escort that would be helpless against the Panzers and their biomorphs if it made a tactical retreat. It decides to stand its ground and fight, absorbing all the punishment it can. Its endeavor to protect those behind it is not very successful. I watch in slow motion as the armored suit gets incinerated and the BP generator gets exposed, resulting in total meltdown.

This is one of those battles that can’t be won in the simulation. If I choose to escape, a great portion of our armed forces gets eliminated and the civilian death toll is catastrophic. If I take the brunt of the blast and fight as hard as I can against the remaining terrorists, I die and leave a young me bereaved.

All these years since the battle, I still struggle with the nightmare scenario that haunted my childhood.

For some kids, academic achievement comes naturally. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. I work all night, but my grades are only a little above average. I know that won’t cut it.

On the main island, the most prestigious military school is the Imperial Japanese Army Academy (Rikugun Shikan Gakko), and the principal way to get accepted is completion of a rigorous three-year course at one of the preparatory schools called Rikugun Yonen Gakko. That, or you show exemplary service as an enlisted soldier and are younger than twenty-five years of age.

If the entrance admission were based on my grades alone, my chances of getting into the top school in the USJ, Berkeley Military Academy (BEMA), would be nonexistent. It’s not as if I have a rich family who can buy my way in, either. The only path open to me is to get a good score on the military supplement to the weeklong imperial exams, then hope I can obtain a military recommendation from someone important who notices my test results. It’s something I pray to the Emperor for every day because I know I have only a one percent chance of success. Fortunately, the academy isn’t looking just for good potential soldiers. They want the best gaming minds to interface with the portical controls on their most advanced machinery. There is historical precedent. The most prominent was one of the best mecha pilots, a cadet with the code name Kujira. She too had average grades and did poorly on the general imperial exams. But her military simulation scores are the best in recorded academy history, and she is a legend as one of our most decorated pilots.

That’s partly why I’ve spent almost every night for the past two years playing the mecha simulations at the Gogo Arcade and why I’m here a week before we’re taking the test. My best friend, Hideki, is also here. Unlike me, he doesn’t want to be a pilot but rather a game designer, as he loves portical games and hopes to get into the gaming division at Berkeley, BEMAG. Both are extremely difficult positions to aspire to.

“I heard the new Cat Odyssey is on the floor,” Hideki tells me.

Even though I can download samples of all games to my portical, many of the new titles have exclusive deals with arcades, so you can play the full version only if you’re physically present.

Cat Odyssey is a series I’ve been playing since I was eight. It’s one of the most popular games in the Empire and shows the history of our Great Pacific War against the Americans from the perspective of a cat. The cat can gain knowledge points that translate to greater powers and acquired abilities, like climbing higher plateaus and dropping down with minimal damage. Part of its allure is its uncannily real visuals, photographic in its depiction of the late 1940s (different iterations take place in different years). The developers took two years to make sure the latest part maintained graphic fidelity to the past, including the deployment of the first mechas, which were originally symbolic figures. They were built by the military as embodiments of the Empire, clad in samurai armor, launching tactical weapons at our American foes but unable to do much else.

I prepare myself for disappointment in case the game doesn’t live up to my expectations. But I’m also playing because some of the endurance levels are said to be designed by Rogue199, the alias for the top developer at Taiyo Tech. She’s the mastermind behind many of the actual mecha simulations for the exam. I want to try it for a few hours to see whether there’s anything that can give me an extra edge on the test. Hideki thinks it’s a fool’s quest, but I’ve never been one to shy away from futile pursuits.

Hideki’s biological family had been in America for several generations, but they’d originally come over from Europe. He doesn’t know much about it, though, since his parents were killed in San Diego and he was adopted by a man who worked as an exterminator. His adoptive dad earned a good living hunting roaches, but Hideki was embarrassed about his profession. At school, Hideki made up stories about his real parents, narratives that would shift depending on his mood, the tales ranging from the exotically grand to the stupendously impossible. He created so many pasts, I think he stopped remembering which were true and which were fictional. He ran away from home multiple times before his guardian shipped him off to live with his aunt here in Granada Hills—which is where I met him. (Honestly, it took me a while before I figured out this much.) We became best friends because of our mutual passion for portical games.

Mac, he calls me, which is short for Makoto. Everyone in the Empire has a Japanese name, no matter their ethnicity. Most also have a nickname in the dominant language of their region. Mine is the name of one of my favorite USJ boxers. “There it is.”

A whole section of the arcade is devoted to Cat Odyssey. All ninety-eight stalls are occupied by gamers. Fortunately, one of our friends saved us a spot.

She’s Griselda Beringer, an exchange student from the Reich city of Hamburg. Taller than each of us, she’s ethnically half-German, half-Japanese. Her hair is blond, and she has sharp green eyes. She is studying engineering and shares our love for gaming. Her specialty is flight and driving simulations. She’s especially good with the Zero sims, beating everyone I’ve seen dogfight against her in the Pacific War re-creations. Unlike us, she doesn’t have to take the imperial exams (German university exams are later), so she can game until her fingers get tired. It’s just the three of us tonight because all our friends are studying for the weeklong exam, which I know is what I should be doing too. I just want to play the new Cat Odyssey.

“How is it?” I ask Griselda, who’s been playing it for the last hour.

She shrugs, intentionally noncommittal to tease me.

“That good?” I say.

She moves aside so I can start. I open my portical, flip out the triangular edges, and use the kikkai field to connect to the game. The display on the stall is hooked into my portical, which I can use as my controller with custom configurations that remain constant. My saved data profiles from my treks through previous iterations of the feline journey come through.

I get dropped into old Los Angeles. Much of the city is in ruins, firebombed by our air force. The Americans are killing anyone they can find of Japanese descent and, incidentally, everyone who appears Asian. They are barbaric in the way they treat foreigners. My cat avatar, Soseki (I know it’s a bit of a cliché when it comes to avatar names), stealthily makes her way through the city alleys. They’ve increased the number of polygonal facets and rewritten the fur system so that it generates cylindrical meshes rather than the usual field of flat planes masquerading as fur. The attention to detail is remarkable.

Much of my gear from my previous save file also transfers over. The Susano Cape lets me traverse water. The Fujin Boot gives my cat the ability to do a double jump in the air. A Tanuki suit grants me a spell to change into a stone statue, which makes me invulnerable to hostiles. With my equipment in place, all of Los Angeles is open for me. Stories based on real-life accounts play out. Many of my missions involve helping those suffering under American rule and assisting USJ soldiers where I can. There is a sense of helplessness that pervades, punctuated by melancholy but catchy music. Orchestral and digitized versions of all the music play in the background, and I opt for the retro-styled beats that are similar to the earlier Odyssey games. Kawada composes all the music in the series. I frequently put myself to sleep listening to his tracks.

I am on my fifteenth mission when Griselda and Hideki pull me away.

“What’s going on?” I ask, annoyed by the interruption.

“You’ve been playing for four hours. Let’s grab something to eat.”

I have to check the clock to make sure they’re not lying to me. They’re not.

There’s a café in the arcade. Hideki orders okonomiyaki with spicy sausages, squid, and pepper jack cheese. Griselda orders a taco with chicken skewers and curry-topped goat nachos. I can’t stop thinking about what to do next and order a watermelon burger salad. It’s a cheap bowl filled with ground beef, fruit, and spinach that’s light, so I can focus on my game without bathroom breaks.

“How are you liking the game?” Griselda asks as she hands me a fork.

“So far, beating expectations,” I reply, taking a bite of my salad. “What are you at?”

“Beating some punks in dogfighting,” she says. “They didn’t heat the curry nachos today!” she exclaims after taking a bite.

“They were stingy with the sausages today too,” Hideki says about his pizza-pancake monstrosity, which takes up a quarter of our table.

Griselda flags down a waiter, and explains, “These nachos are too cold, and the chips are soggy.”

“Can I get some more sausages on mine?” Hideki asks the waiter, who looks similar in age to us.

“Depends on the angle and facial expression. Like I could be way down here,” I say, and lower myself. “And I could be making the worst expression, and you’d have no idea.” I raise myself back up and have my face contorted and my tongue sticking out.

“Not sure if you’re being disrespectful or just an idiot,” Hideki says with a laugh. “What you gotta do is let out a small fart when you bow. They might not know you’re being disrespectful. But they’ll smell it.”

Griselda glowers at Hideki. “That is a horrible suggestion. Which is why I’m going to take you up on it next time I have to bow to one of those gaming idiots who challenges me, thinking they can take my money.”

The waiter brings back the food and has added fishcake balls as a token of his apology. Griselda puts her hands together, simpers, and says in as cute a voice as she can muster, “Itadakimasu,” before taking a bite of her nachos, then putting her thumb up in approval.

I honestly don’t know why she always says that before eating.
I’ve explained to her our customs are different here versus the main island and that no one says that here in the USJ. Much of our culture, and even many of our expressions, would be unfamiliar in Tokyo, and vice versa. While we’re all members of the Empire, it doesn’t mean we’re a uniform bunch who mimic one another. The citizens in Tokyo are different from those in Taiko City, Vancouver, Dallas Tokai, Sydney, and Los Angeles.

Right after the end of the Great Pacific War, Nakahara, the Minister of Language, believed different languages inherently had within them unique structures of thinking that would give the Empire flexibility and growth that wouldn’t be possible if the local dialects were eliminated. While Japanese is the official imperial language throughout the Empire and required learning, within our governed areas, we are encouraged to speak the local dialect. That’s why we speak English in the USJ.

But Griselda likes to fuse on a whim, picking and choosing what she wants to imitate.

“Is it better?” Hideki asks.

“Definitely crispier,” she replies, taking a loud, scrumptious bite.

Hideki is about to say something but gets a call, a portical game track humming. Based on his immediate pickup and cooing voice, I can tell it’s his girlfriend, Sango. He leaves to talk with her privately. She’s a year older than he and works at a literary bar to pay her bills so she can get another chance at the exams—her scores weren’t high enough to get into the university she wanted the first time around.

“You know what I’m most looking forward to?” Griselda asks me.

I shake my head.

“Home. I haven’t been back to Konigsbarg,” she says, pronouncing Konigsberg with her local accent, “in two years. I miss the veal meatballs. They put in a little touch of white pepper and anchovies. There’s nothing like them anywhere else. You should visit after graduation. I can show you around the city, and we can take a train to Berlin and visit the Adolph Hitler Plaza and the Fuehrer’s Tomb.”

The idea of visiting Hitler’s tomb, knowing all that he’s done against the Empire, isn’t that appealing to me. Before I can respond, Hideki gets back and is all smiles.

“How’s Sango?” I ask.

“I wasn’t talking to her,” he replies. Usually, he’ll elaborate, but he has a cryptic smile.

Griselda says, “Your portical ring is lame.”

“You’re just snobby about game music.”

“Snobby means I’m just saying it to say it. Mahler and Wagner are on a different level from your portical game composers,” Griselda affirms.

Griselda pulls out a chip covered in cheese. “The ‘great despisers are the great reverers,’” she quotes, taking a loud bite. “I revere music, which is why I’m so picky about it.”

They debate for a bit. My mind is on Odyssey. They sense it and release me with a laugh.

I return to late 1940s Los Angeles. Soseki has to make some tough choices. There’s rampant speculation that the American cats are getting desperate and are willing to do anything to defeat the Empire’s cats. I scout Los Angeles for clues about my enemy while getting used to the new cat quadruped controls, which are more complex than in previous games. A part of me wonders if these controls in any way mimic actual quad mechas.

Griselda taps me on the shoulder. “My cousin locked himself out of his apartment, so I’m going to head home. Don’t meow yourself to death.”

“Meow?” I reply.

It’s seven in the morning before I reach the next part of the quest. Hideki picks up a bowl of instant ramen and gets me the spicy seafood flavor I love. My teachers tell me I shouldn’t eat so much ramen because that’s what gives me all my pimples and my belly. But I’d rather be pimply and cart a little extra weight than give up my favorite noodles.

I have only an hour left before I have to head to school. But I want to finish up my current quest. I can catch up on sleep in math since our teacher doesn’t care what we do in class as long as we show up.

I enter an area where humans are blocking off access to restaurant trash. I’m required to defeat them so I can get the goods I need to feed my community. But my opponents are too fast, and I can’t combat them quickly enough. Even my special attacks fail to distract them, and one of the humans knocks me off my feet. They approach with knives and evil grins. I realize they’re going to eat me. I try to escape, but the screen goes blank after I get hit too many times.

“Fifth life over,” the screen tells me. I get nine lives, and as soon as I lose the ninth, I have to create a brand-new profile and surrender my cat soul to portical oblivion.

“You were just too slow. You need to work on your finger reflexes. At that speed, they’re going to eat you up for the official simulation.”

It makes me wonder if Rogue199 designed these cat battles with mecha combat in mind.

The special mecha simulation test, also heavily designed by Rogue199, is the exam the Berkeley Military Academy’s board is most interested in. The field test is based on one of our most deadly conflicts, the Dallas Incident of 1972.

Dallas Tokai was under attack by an unknown enemy, and the extent of the conflict was unknown to USJ Command. They sent three quad mechas, thinking it was a local incident. But the Germans had dispatched a legion of their biomechs. Of the three quad mechas that reported, only one returned. That was because the pilot fled the scene while the other two stayed behind to fight as they’d determined it was more important that one escape with the combat data the USJ could use to fight other biomechs. It was an honorable action that was forgiven by command, but she still felt disgraced for leaving her companions behind and put a knife through her throat.

For anyone who takes the test, the performance is judged by a panel. Since the parameters for the test change every time, it’s not so much seeing whether you succeed but rather testing the creativity in the way you respond. I’ve heard there are people who’ve failed to escape but been admitted to the Berkeley Military Academy, which raises my hopes. In the test, I’ll handle the main load of the simulation, though I’m required to bring one person as my wingmate. That person acts as a backup and gets a much simpler setup, which is why I’m relieved to have Hideki. I’ve never met anyone with quicker fingers. Except maybe Griselda. But she’s not allowed since she isn’t part of the Empire, and Hideki would never forgive me if I asked anyone else.

“Hate to break it to you, but there’s no way you’re getting into BEMA if you play that bad,” Hideki tells me.

I know he’s right, and that’s a big reason why I’ve been playing the sims here. But even those are said to be insufficient comparisons to the actual test, as there’s no official way to prepare for it. I sincerely hope that mastering the controls on Cat Odyssey is actually a good way to warm up for the test. “You shouldn’t have tried to fight the humans head-on,” he admonishes me, doing the small head shake he always does when he gets in his lecturing mood.

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“Change the battlefield or avoid the fight.”

“My community needed food,” I protest.

“And now you’re dead, so they won’t get it anyway.”

I’m too tired to argue with him, so I nod, and say, “We should get going.”

We’ve avoided corporal punishment for most of the year by being on time to class. Depending on the mood our homeroom teacher is, we can get it really bad or escape with just a few slaps. Hideki took a terrible beating last year when the teacher broke one of his ribs. He had a hard time breathing for half a year, anger in every breath as he swore, “I will get out of here and make them all regret the way they’ve treated us.”

It became the mantra by which he lived.

We all wear blue uniforms to school. The boys wear coats, buttoned white shirts, ties, and a whole lot of monotony. Swap out our pants for long skirts, and you have the female uniforms. We do our best to differentiate ourselves with custom straps on our bags and bright bands, but if anyone wears something that diverges too much from the standard, it gets confiscated.

After we arrive at school, we leave our shoes in small lockers and put on slippers. We head to the second floor, where our homeroom is located. Once the school bell rings, we stand up, put our right hands over our hearts, and state in unison: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of Japan and to the Empire for which it stands, one nation under the Emperor, indivisible, with order and justice for all.”

An image of the Emperor in a dragon mask appears as a holograph in front of our classroom. We bow in respect for a full minute after we’ve recited the pledge. We spend another minute mentally thanking the Emperor for all he’s done for our people. A shortened version of the song, “Star Spangled Sun,” plays as tribute to all of those who’ve suffered and still fight to establish the Empire in all its glory. Hakko ichiu is the aim, having all the world under one roof.

Our homeroom class has twenty-eight students. We stay in the same room, and the teachers change with each new class, though there are electives that require some of us to walk to different rooms in the afternoon.

At lunch, Hideki asks what I’m doing. I lift up my portical and point to the commentary on the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyoiku ni Kansuru Chokugo) for the exams. “Have fun,” he says nonchalantly, joining some of the seniors going off campus for lunch.

Griselda meets with her German contingent, who stick together during the forty-five-minute break. I head for some benches outside, lie down, and read the commentary, focused on the middle of the Rescript, discussing the maintenance of the prosperity of the Imperial Throne.

Across from me, also reading, is Noriko Tachibana. She is not only one of the smartest students in our year, but is from a family of prestigious imperial officers. Her grandfather flew Zeros, and both her parents were heroes in our proxy wars in Afghanistan. Noriko is at the top of our class. She also juggles numerous extra-S curricular activities like ice-skating, at which she is excellent, and is president of half a dozen academic clubs on campus. I’ve always admired her. She is reading a book—something by Fumiko Enchi. Noriko is of African descent, and her grandparents fought for the Empire against the horrors the Nazis were perpetrating.

“Hi, Mac,” she says to me when she notices my gaze.

“Hi, Nori.” I wave at her. She’s in our homeroom, and we’d been previously assigned together on three projects in which she took charge, leading us to get the top score.

“You too,” I say, and feel dumb because she doesn’t need luck— she always gets the highest score.

If she’s annoyed, she doesn’t show it and instead goes back to reading.

Right as lunch ends, an announcement on the speaker system informs us, “Please assemble in the field for an important meeting.”

All two thousand students line up outside, separated by homerooms. As seniors, we’re in the middle section up front. The flag bearer is holding the imperial flag, and the three next to her are carrying our school banner. Up front, the principal is very active, explaining something with overly exaggerated politeness to two officers. They nod in affirmation, and the principal points at us. Eventually, he introduces them on the speaker.

“This is Colonel Kita and Lieutenant Yukimura. They are heroes of the second San Diego Conflict and have honored us with their company.”
Colonel Kita is a tall woman with red hair and two sheathed swords on her belt. The lieutenant has a metal arm under his uniform and wears a beret rather than the traditional cap.

“Next week is an important week for all of you,” Colonel Kita states. “Many of you will have your futures determined by your imperial examination scores. There is no greater glory than serving your country through military service. I have served for two decades, and it is always humbling to realize the great responsibility thrust upon us. Not only are we protecting the United States of Japan, but we are preserving order and a way of life that is in harmony with the universe. How many of you plan on taking the military supplemental exams?”

A quarter of the students raise their hands. She asks the other students to applaud those who are striving to enter the military.

That’s when the ground shakes. I feel a flutter in my chest.
Could it be? The second tremor confirms it, and there are awed
gasps as we see the figure coming closer.

It is a mecha, shaped like a huge suit of samurai armor. Even though it’s bigger than the tallest building in Granada Hills, it’s much smaller than the Korosu class. From the looks of it, it’s a reconnaissance mecha, quick, stealthy, and hard to detect when it doesn’t want to be found. It’s sleek and has chest plates designed to deflect sensors or absorb their waves when that is impossible.

“This is the Taka,” the colonel says. “I have a crew of fourteen of the finest soldiers in the mecha corps. We have been serving together for the past three years, and we’ll be giving demonstrations for select cadets.”

The Taka stops right outside the school. Over the gate, I see the shin guard, the retractable knees, the searchlights in the hips, all culminating in the main armor shaped like a classical samurai’s haramaki-do. The separated plates are usually there to hide weapons and circuitry, as well as for ventilation purposes in case there is any overheating during combat. The reconnaissance mechas handle heat very well, though, and the purpose of the detached plates might be for a refractory effect, which is only rumored at, never confirmed. Some of the prototype mechas reportedly have a type of camouflage, similar to that on our cars, which makes them practically transparent when they need to be.

I’ve battled digital mechas in the simulation multiple times. But seeing them in real life is indescribable. I wonder if my parents felt the same sense of awe every time they got on board a mecha.

The two officers personally inspect us, walking down the aisles, asking each of us our names, and, “Which section are you testing for?”

Some answer navy, gaming division, etc. Eight students in my homeroom state their intent to apply for the mecha corps, which elicits pride in the officers. The colonel and lieutenant even know Noriko and greet her by name.

“Based on all we’ve heard, you’ll make your parents proud,” the colonel says.

“I hope so, ma’am,” Nori replies.

“I’ll personally be reviewing your sim test next week.”

They finally get to me, and the lieutenant asks, “Which unit are you aiming for?”

“Mecha corps,” I proudly answer, excited at the chance to meet a mecha pilot in person.

They both hesitate. Lieutenant Yukimara says firmly, “Our corps is one of the most difficult units to get into. Are you prepared?”

“Yes, sir.”

The lieutenant looks me up and down. “You don’t look like you’re in shape. Do you think we take just anyone in the corps?”

“N-no, sir.”

Based on his expression, the lieutenant is about to say something even harsher, but the colonel stops him. They move to the next student. I look down at my stomach. I’ve tried to control my eating, exercise as much as I can. But it’s been a tough year, and the best way to make myself feel better is a combination of coconut coffee, strawberry shortcake with chocolate crumbs, and shrimp chips.

The review is finished an hour later, and we’re allowed to approach the Taka. It is even more marvelous up close. The officers take Noriko and three other students into the mecha. I feel a pang of envy, but it also motivates me to work harder, so I’ll get my chance one day. When I’m back in my apartment thirty minutes later, I read up everything I can on reconnaissance mechas.

I share my small room with three others. I’m on the bunk bed in the upper-left side. We have concrete floors, which makes them too cold to walk on without socks. We don’t have climate control, so on some nights when it gets too hot, I’ll sleep on the ground to cool myself. Someone let a fly in, and it’s buzzing around. My three other roommates are out, probably studying at the library. I have several messages from Hideki, asking me to meet him at a nearby café to study. A part of me wants to start my new life on Cat Odyssey. But I promised no more gaming until after the exam. I message Hideki and tell him I’ll meet him there. I exit my apartment, go to the communal bathroom to wash up, and leave my building. The security guard is busy watching a dating show on his portical where people dress up as animals and spend time in zoos so people can gawk at them.

Hideki is at Penny’s, which is just two kilometers away. I pass by several carts selling udon and other nightly snacks for students. The smell of fish broth and tempura wafts past me, making me hungry. War orphans like me are given weekly stipends as part of a fund for children of veterans who passed away in battle. We’re also granted generous discounts on everything.

Penny’s Café is next to ten other coffee shops. The façade is a gigantic copper penny with the face of Abraham Lincoln, an old American warlord who savagely crushed a rebellion started by the southern half of the United States. Inside, the walls are covered with coins from foreign nations that joined the Empire, including a whole lot of American pennies.

Hideki is studying on his portical. Griselda is with some friends, but she waves at me when I enter and comes over.

I order a cup of coconut coffee and shrimp chips, then feel guilty as I recall the conversation with the officers. I’ll work on losing weight after the exam since I’ve read that caffeine is supposed to boost memory and I need a boost badly, as I have to memorize a million details about generals and battle dates. 1948, July 4, the USA becomes the USJ. 1950, September 9, Germany and Japan establish the Unity Zone (UZ) at Texas (though it would come to be called the Quiet Border by both sides). 1958, Germany launches a sneak attack on Texas, and a group of our mechas known as the Twelve Disciples stops them. I read about the Nazi attempt to create their own mechas and their desire to inject a biological component to them, resulting in the monstrosities known initially as the biomorphs and more recently as the biomechs. There are too many dates to remember.

She pokes me in my stomach. “They have a point. You wanna jog with me every morning?”

“I would if I could wake up.”

“Discipline,” she says. “I jog even if I haven’t slept the night before. Soldiers need to be in tip-top shape always.”

“After the exam, I’ll join you every morning.”

“I hate running,” Hideki groans. “No way I’m waking up at five in the morning to run.”

“You run at five every morning?” I ask her.

She nods. “Early bird rules all the worms.”

“Half the worms,” Hideki objects.

She laughs, eats one of her chocolates, specially branded as the United Chocolates of Japan from the best chocolate makers in the world, Menkes. “That one chocolate pretty much nullified jogging the last three mornings.”

“Was it worth it?” I ask her.

“Absolutely,” she answers. “Want one?”

I get to studying with Hideki after drinking some milk chocolate. Some students have turned on the popular show, Drink Don’t Die, which is a competition to get as drunk as possible and brave dangerous obstacle courses.

“Look at this guy!” Griselda says to us.

We watch her screen. A man is sucking his thumb and rolling on the ground, acting like a baby and screaming at everyone around him. All three of us laugh at his preposterous performance as we switch the camera angles, zoom in and out, then rate his likability factor.

The show cuts away, and broadcasters inform us they’ve arrested three new members of the National Revolutionaries of America (NARA). They’re a fringe terrorist group who believe America should become independent again. A city official thanks the local police, and broadcasters reveal they were trying to perpetrate an attack at a sumo-wrestling match. Griselda and Hideki are annoyed that their show has been interrupted.

I remember a few years ago I was at the Gogo Arcade when the George Washingtons released their game, the USA. Gamers took interest for a short time, but the controls were too clunky, and the whole scenario, where America won the Pacific War, was too implausible to take seriously. I’ve been reading and rereading that history for the exam, so I know we had all the resources of Asia and Europe behind us. Plus, we had nuclear weapons. What could the American forces do? Still, USA became popular just because it was forbidden and for a while, it was all the rage until the Liquid Gear games came out a few months later to critical acclaim (I was addicted to each game) and Cat Odyssey after that.

We notice there is a commotion in the room. Everyone is staring at their porticals. On the wall display, there is footage of a huge fire. Someone turns up the volume.

“—from the Rio Grande. There are still unconfirmed reports that—” I don’t wait for the broadcaster. I flip open my portical and read the California Nippon News.

“Attack on the Texas Sonic Line,” the headline reads.

One of our trains has been attacked, and there are only eleven survivors, but they’re not expected to make it through the night. No one knows who the culprits are. Footage from a security recording of the explosion plays. The bullet train, or Shinkansen, is going at the speed of sound when, suddenly, birds scatter from a tree. I don’t see anything that could have caused the motion, but then, the second car in the train is crushed down as though something hammered it. The back of the train slams into the second car, and a pileup ensues as the rest of the train derails. The earlier arrest of the NARA members makes me wonder if the two events are somehow connected.

“They should require all the terrorists they capture to go on Drink Don’t Die,” Griselda grumbles.

Try as hard as I can, it’s hard for me to get back to studying. I have this terrible habit of imagining people’s last moments as they die. Those people in the train were most likely on their porticals, having no idea their lives were going to be snuffed out. Maybe dining on a bento box, some of the older generation listening to an old Enka ballad, then blink and gone.

“Excuse me, everyone.” The manager of the café is at the central platform and bows. “I’m very sorry. The local police have requested all public places close immediately and that students return home as quickly as possible.” This would feel less surreal if he wasn’t wearing a big penny hat and a baldric of pennies over his shoulder.

We pack our stuff and walk out. Griselda lives in the opposite direction from us, and I offer to walk her home.

“Who says USJ men aren’t chivalrous?” she asks. She holds both our arms, and says, “But I should actually be offering to walk both of you home as you’ll need my protection in case the bad guys attack.”

“What’s that mean?” Hideki asks.

She puts both her fists up. “It means I’d love to punch out some of those terrorists. Stick and move, Mac, stick and move. You don’t know how much destruction they’re causing in the Reich.” She grins at both of us. “Don’t worry about me. Just get yourselves home safely. Jaa ne.”

She skips away.

“Want to play Cat Odyssey tonight?” Hideki asks.

“But the Gogo Arcade—”

“Never closes.”

I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.

It’s almost morning, and I’ve made headway with multiple quests. I’m about to log off when three older gamers approach me, and say, “Time to quit the game and make room for the pros.”

I’m about to tell them I’m almost done, but they shut off my game before I can save my progress. “What the hell?” I exclaim. “I didn’t save yet.”

I want to protest, but Hideki asks me to give him my portical, which I do. He connects it to his own, hands it back to me a minute later. Behind us, the three have started their game of Cat Odyssey. Hideki asks me to activate a program. I recognize it as a type of kikkai disruptor, which locks onto the portical links of the three who took over my stall.

“Push the button,” he tells me.

I do, and a surge hits their porticals, disrupting their connections. They can’t connect with the arcade. I hear them yelling, frustrated.

“How long does it last?”

“Could be permanent, could be a few days, depending on their skill level.” Hideki laughs. “I developed it because too many people tried to bully me off my games.”

“You use it a lot?”

“All the time. I’ve put it on your portical, so you can use it whenever you want. Best thing is, it works on any portical.” He demonstrates on a few others and laughs when he sees that mayhem ensues.

Typical Hideki.

We head for school but arrive at the subway station a minute late. The train has already taken off. We wait on a bench. Hideki falls asleep on my shoulder and snores. I wake him when spit from his mouth is about to drop onto my shoulder.

“Why you wake me up?” Hideki asks, irritated.

“You were snoring.”

He rubs his face, gets the discharge out of his eyes with his middle finger. “I just had this dream that I was in a city full of prehistoric supermosquitoes that hunted everyone down so they could suck their blood.”

“Sounds juicy,” I mutter back.

The train arrives, and we hop aboard. On the portical displays on the subway walls, California Nippon News gives updates on the Rio Grande situation. I’m relieved to see Colonel Yamaoka, one of our war heroes from San Diego.

“It’s still too early to determine what happened,” he states. “We’re investigating, but we won’t be giving any updates until we know what happened.”

“Is there a link to the NARA?” a reporter asks.

“At the moment, we’re not sure.”

“Is there a possibility this could mean the reemergence of the George Washingtons?”

Colonel Yamaoka shakes his head, and the gesture carries gravity as he helped us vanquish them. “Intelligence reports indicate that the last of the George Washingtons were eliminated in the second San Diego Conflict.”

“Has there been any comment from the German embassy?”

The Rio Grande is located at the Quiet Border, where our two empires meet.

“They’ve expressed their condolences and have offered their assistan—”

All of a sudden, the train comes to a stop. I look around and see fear in everyone’s eye, the same impulse that’s swelling up inside me. Is something happening? Are we under attack? I want to get out, break the window if I can escape. But there’s nowhere to go. One man yells, “Why aren’t we moving?”

My throat feels acutely dry. The news broadcaster is still de-S scribing the Rio Grande. It would be so unfair if this is the way things end.

The train stutters, then continues as though nothing happened. All of us hold our breaths, unsure what’s going on. When we actually arrive at the next stop, I breathe in relief, grateful that I’m alive.

I wake Hideki up. “Are we there yet?” he asks.

“One stop away,” I answer. I feel stupidly nervous about the train. “Do you mind if we walk the rest of the way?”

He shrugs. “Sure.”

We arrive at school fifteen minutes late, causing us to miss the morning pledge. I feel bad and am ready to apologize on both our behalves. Our homeroom teacher, Joshuyo-san, is waiting.

“Why are you tardy today?” he angrily demands.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I say and bow. “It was my fault. There was a problem on the subway, and—”

“Hideki! Why are you late?” our teacher asks, ignoring my answer.

“Because we decided to walk instead of taking the subway,” Hideki truthfully answers, which surprises me. There is a hint of insolence in his voice, which our teacher immediately catches. Ever since Joshuyo-san beat him last year for tardiness, there’s been a palpable tension between the two.

“Why’s that?”

“I wanted fresh air.”

“You wanted fresh air?” He nods and seems accepting until he strikes both of us in the mouth with his fist. “This is your last week before the imperial exam, and you want fresh air! What would your parents think? They sacrificed their lives in San Diego so you could live!” he yells in front of the whole class. “Hands out!” He is going to make an example out of us. “Hands out!”

We raise our hands, palms up. Our teacher uses a thick metal stick and beats down as hard as he can. I yell out loud, knowing he wants to hear us cry. When it comes to Hideki, there is a loud slap.

But Hideki doesn’t make a noise. The teacher doesn’t like that and strikes his hands again. This time, Hideki smirks at him. Has he lost his mind? Joshuyo-san is furious, and asks, “Do you find this amusing?”

“No, sir,” Hideki replies.

Our teacher strikes Hideki’s face with the ruler, but Hideki refuses to stop smirking. Joshuyo-san throttles his neck and throws
him to the ground.

“I will beat you until you learn respect,” he says.

Hideki tries to kick the teacher away, which infuriates him more. There is nothing that riles him up more than resistance. He flings his arms at Hideki. It’s pointless fighting against the teacher—what rights and protections do we have as orphans? I want to urge Hideki to let it pass, but he’s having none of it.

“What about respect for my parents?” Hideki protests. “Our parents made the ultimate sacrifice, and this is the way you treat us! We’re the ones who have to pay because of their stupid decision to die for the Empire!”

I can feel years of frustration flooding out of him as I too wonder about their decision. I admire Hideki’s guts for standing up for himself, even if I know what’s coming. Our homeroom teacher’s face has turned apoplectic, and his fists come down hard on Hideki. All Hideki has to do is pretend to be penitent, ask for forgiveness, and it’d be over. But he refuses and gets a flurry of kicks as his penance.

Hideki is gasping, pain printed on his face. But he won’t give in and seems to be daring the teacher to beat him to death. I can’t stand it anymore. I get up and rush to block the teacher.

“Joshuyo-san, please,” I plead, trying to stop him.

“Get your hands off me!” he roars, and punches me in the shoulder. “You think you’re so tough!”

“No, sir,” I say. “I’m sorry, sir.”

His fury is being redirected toward me as he pushes me against the wall. He punches my belly and throws me to the ground. It will hurt, but I know that as long as I keep apologizing— His shoe comes directly at my mouth, and my teeth shake at the impact. I can smell blood coating my gums. I fight against tears. I won’t cry in front of him again as I did in past beatings.

“I’m sorry, sir, it’s my fault, sir,” I repeat several times.

I can only hope his anger will abate. But he’s just getting more violent. “Neither of you deserve the mercy the Empire has shown you!”

“Joshuyo-san!” Griselda calls out.

Our teacher looks up at her. “What is it?” He is more attentive to her as she’s an international exchange student.

“I’m not feeling well. Permission to go to the nurse’s office.”

“You have permission!” he orders.

“I need help getting there, sir,” she says, and bows. “Sumimasen.”

He’s about to order someone to help her, but we both get up and escort her.

“Thanks for saving us,” I tell her, when we get outside the class.

“Why’d you get here so late?” she asks. “You know how he is about that.”

“I got nervous,” I say, and explain about the train stop.

Hideki’s face is covered with blood, and he states, “I’ll be outside.”

He leaves without waiting for our reply. I escort Griselda to the nurse for her “visit.” She reminds me, “It’s only a few more weeks, and you can wave bye to this school forever.”

I leave and find Hideki in the main field. He’s smoking defiantly, a snarl forming with every puff.

“Why didn’t you just apologize?” I ask.

“I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It is,” he says.

“All he cares about is our showing up on time, so he doesn’t lose face,” I explain, hoping to make it seem less personal. “Keep good general attendance, and he gets his bonus.”

“All our pain so he can get a thousand extra yen? For what? His girlfriend? His dog?”

When he puts it like that, it sounds so dehumanizing.

“I have something I want to ask you,” he says. “Don’t get upset.”

“Why would I get upset?”

He pulls on the lower half of his cheek with his fingers, his instinctive gesture when he is getting serious. “I’m sick of this life, and I know I’m not going to do well on the exams. I’ve failed all the preliminary tests. If I fail this time, they’re going to force me to wait another year to retake the exam. I can’t take this kind of treatment anymore.”

“We just gotta study hard for the next week, and we’re going to rock the mecha sim test next week.”

Hideki shakes his head. “Who are you kidding?” He sighs. “I’ve always dreamt of making games. You’ve always wanted to be a mecha pilot. What if I told you there was a guaranteed way to make it happen?”

“There are no guarantees.”

“Be realistic. We both know there’s no way in the world you’re getting into BEMA. And that means you’re not going to pilot a mecha.”

“Thanks for your confidence.”

“Don’t be naive,” he says. “Even with another year, our scores will probably get worse. I’ve seen how much Sango struggles to pay her bills. She knows her score isn’t going up since she has no time to study.”

“What do you want to do?” I ask.

“We have a chance if we use this,” Hideki says, holding up his portical.

I don’t see anything special about it. “What is that?”

“It’s a program I found on the kikkai. An adaptor to feed into the test.”

“Any adaptor you use will be tracked by the school,” I say. Schools lock down on students during exam week, taking their porticals away to prevent any form of cheating. “There’s no way you’re going to get it past the encryption, either.”

“This guy I met has a way.”

“What way?”

“I can’t talk about it yet. I just want to know, do you want in?”

“Wait, what are you saying?” I ask.

“Do you want a guaranteed way of accessing all the answers for the exam?”

I can’t believe he’s seriously suggesting this. “Are you joking?”

“Never been more serious.”

“What’s this guy want in return?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” I laugh skeptically. Someone offers to help us cheat and doesn’t want anything back? My internal alarms were suspicious before and are blaring now.

“Well, something, but later, down the line.”

“What’s that something?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.” He puts out the last part of his cigarette. “You don’t have to decide now. Just think about it and let me know later this week.”

“What if we get caught?”

“It won’t be any different if we fail.”

“But—”

“I’ve already made my decision. Think about it and tell me if you’re in or not,” he says, cutting me off. “See you later.” He bolts.

What would I do if I failed the exam and didn’t get into any university? That I don’t have an alternative scares me.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2018/08/09/excerpts-mecha-samurai-empire-peter-tieryas/feed/0Super Mario Brothers: Fantasy or Science Fiction?https://www.tor.com/2017/10/24/super-mario-brothers-fantasy-or-science-fiction/
https://www.tor.com/2017/10/24/super-mario-brothers-fantasy-or-science-fiction/#commentsTue, 24 Oct 2017 17:00:32 +0000https://www.tor.com/?p=308241At first glance, it seems pretty straightforward that the Super Mario Brothers games are a fantasy series. They take place in a fantastic world with dragons, princesses, and magic mushrooms, and the RPGs in the series have all the typical role-playing elements of a fantasy game. But when you look at the entire franchise, particularly […]]]>

At first glance, it seems pretty straightforward that the Super Mario Brothers games are a fantasy series. They take place in a fantastic world with dragons, princesses, and magic mushrooms, and the RPGs in the series have all the typical role-playing elements of a fantasy game. But when you look at the entire franchise, particularly the Super Mario Galaxy games, it seems almost certain that the game is science fiction, or at least science fantasy. Here are five reasons revolving around specific titles in the series that prove the Super Mario Brothers are works of science fiction.

The Many Worlds of Super Mario Galaxy

Up until the arrival of Nintendo, many game designers had programming backgrounds. The creator of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto, was unique in having an art background and imbued his games with his artistic sensibility. The original Super Mario Bros. was a visual breakthrough after the pixel blips of the Atari, creating appealing characters, scrolling worlds, and blue skies (most backgrounds were black from fear of causing headaches and eyestrain for gamers). Miyamoto revolutionized the gaming canvas with a simple shift in the palette and more importantly, focused on the aesthetics as much as the gameplay. His attention to character designs like the goombas, Mario himself, and Bowser is a huge part of what has made them so iconic all these decades later. In a world inspired by Alice in Wonderland and filled with enormous mushrooms and fiery castles, he seamlessly integrated the art into the level design.

The Super Mario Galaxy games that came a few decades later for the Wii weren’t just an evolution of that first foray into gaming art. They are probably the most innovative games ever developed. There are other titles that outdo it in terms of visuals, physical scope, and narrative, but none in its creative blending of game mechanics and gorgeous artistry. Galaxy subverted gravity to literally flip gaming on its head. Planetoids, brand new suits (traverse clouds, use drills to power your way through the center of a planet, and sting like a bee), along with labyrinthine levels, help make the universe your sandbox. Mario is the Kirk of the Nintendo Universe, rushing headfirst into adventure. But unlike the crew of the Enterprise, Mario embraces the strange physics of these vibrant worlds, leaping from world to world, interacting with them and changing their very fabric. It’s an amazing sensation navigating a lava world which you then freeze so you can skate across a barren ice lake to reach a new launch star—just one of many acts of terraforming.

It’s during one of these excursions that you come across the Starshine Beach Galaxy. It immediately struck me how much it resembled Isle Delfino, the central location of Super Mario Sunshine (Mario’s outing on the Game Cube), and home to the Piantas, the oddly happy race with palm trees growing out of their heads. Yoshi is there, the tropical climate is back, and all that was missing was my Fludd rocket pack.

On another trip, I visited the Supermassive Galaxy, a world where all the enemies came supersized. Whether it was different laws of gravity, or the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the Goombas, Koopa Troopas, and their surrounding building blocks resembled the gigantic forces in Giant Land from Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Tiny-Huge Island of Super Mario 64 (depending on which approach you took).

That’s when I began to wonder: were the unique worlds of the Super Mario series different galaxies Mario had ventured to? What if all the fantasy worlds of Super Mario were various adventures in the separate galaxies, and the Mushroom Kingdom was just one of many worlds? That is pretty much what is shown in the first Super Mario Galaxy when Princess Peach’s Castle is taken from its foundations by Bowser and lifted up into space above the planet.

The Dimensional Shifting of Super Paper Mario Wii

The first time I read about and actually understood the science of dimensions and their connection with our own world was in Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace. He postulated the idea of how 2D beings would be flabbergasted by the possibility of 3D existence, unable to comprehend going from a flat plane to the geometric explosion of spatial propulsion. In Super Paper Mario, dimensional shifting becomes the key game mechanic, bridging the NES and SNES classics with their 3D counterparts. Count Bleck is trying to open a singularity called “The Void” in hopes of wiping out the universe. But Mario, with the use of a dimensional shifter, uses quantum mechanics to show that even a paper cut can be deadly in the right hands.

It was probably the best illustration of dimensional limitations I’d experienced, incorporating clever puzzles in every nook and alleyway. See a hole you can’t traverse? Flip into 3D and go around it. An impregnable wall? Change your perspective and suddenly, the way is clear. If superstrings were titillations in higher dimensions, I wondered how my mad waves of the Wii controller and their ululations in my finger muscles were transmuting two dimensions down. Butterflies aren’t the only ones who can cause storms on the other side of the planet.

Mario’s first shifts into 3D involved ripping apart the threads of his flat existence. It caused him pain and damage, sustainable only in short sprints. By the time Mario 64 swings around, he’s become adjusted to the three dimensions, and by the time of Galaxy, he’s prancing across space, flying free.

The Super Mario Bros 2 That Wasn’t Really Super Mario Bros. 2

I’ve talked a lot about physics, and it’s because the original Mario games set the standard by which gaming physics are judged. The original NES platformers had smooth controls that were intuitive and made jumping and running feel right. Try loading up any of the other Nintendo games of the time, and you’ll notice many of them have jumps that feel clunky and frustrating, resulting in a lot of cheap deaths and busted controllers. Super Mario Bros. 3 was probably the pinnacle of the Mario 2D platformers, slightly edging Super Mario World. A huge part of that was the variety of suits that introduced all new mechanics, as well as the steampunk background; huge airships, themed worlds, and Bowser statues that fired laser beams.

Among all the Mario games, one stands out for being vastly different. Super Mario Brothers 2 started out as Doki Doki Panic before morphing into a strange sequel for the original Super Mario Brothers. In the biggest change to the gameplay, the brothers were accompanied by Princess Toadstool and Toad. Their task was to rescue Dreamland from Wart who has been creating a legion of monsters via his dream machine. I always used either Luigi or the Princess, the former because of his long, wiggling jump, and the latter because she could hover. Stomping on enemies no longer crushed them. Instead, you picked them up and hurtled them at each other. The world felt much more whimsical with surreal elements like eagle faced gates, moby dicks spouting water, magic carpets, and cherries leading to invincibility stars. It was a Kafkaesque romp with bizarre enemies and masked fiends. It’s also probably the best argument that the franchise is essentially fantasy.

But the ending renders it moot because after defeating Wart, we find out it was all a part of Mario’s dream. Talk about lucid dreaming.

Time Travel and Other Mad Science

What would it be like to travel through your subconscious meanderings? Jump back in time to see the early stages of the Mushroom Kingdom and fight off an alien invasion with your younger self? Or become microsized and enter Bowser’s body in an uncomfortably intestinal collaboration? The Mario & Luigi series took all that was strange about the Mario series and made it stranger, infusing elements of science fiction and pop culture to give gamers quirks that only magic mushrooms could inspire.

Or a mad professor. Professor Elvin Gadd—an Albert Einstein/Thomas Edison hybrid—invents a time machine in Partners in Time, the Fludd used in Sunshine, as well as the Poltergust 3000 that allows Luigi to vacuum up ghosts in Luigi’s Mansion. Gadd shares the same voice actor for Yoshi, Kazumi Totaka, and both augment the super powers the brothers wield. Likewise, both have their own obscure language that is incomprehensible gibberish unless you’re a baby—so it’s a good thing baby Mario and Luigi are around to help out their future selves battle the alien horde of the Shroob in Partners in Time. It turns out baby tears are the kryptonite to the Shroob, so the Professors Gadd channel baby tears (manufactured, of course) into a hydrogush blaster to save the world and send everyone back to their proper place in the timeline.

All along, I’ve assumed that unlike Link in the Zelda games, Mario is the same Mario throughout the series. Is that even the case? Or does each Mario game represent an alternate history, a new iteration of the mythical plumber? What were plumbers like thousands of years ago? The word plumber has its origins in the Roman word for lead, plumbum. Anyone who worked with piping and baths (many of which were made of lead) were called Plumbarius. Mario and Luigi don’t just represent the common Joe—they embody the highly malleable and adaptable materials that have been the cornerstone of civilization.

That Time the Dinosaurs Didn’t All Go Extinct

On the inverse, the daily life of a goomba isn’t easy. They spend their whole lives training in the ranks of Bowser’s dystopia in order to become fodder for Mario and his goons, crushed to death (if you haven’t, I highly recommend this short film about life from the perspective of a Goomba). The other minions in Koopa’s army don’t fare much better. If only Bowser would give up his master plan to kidnap Princess Peach, what kind of empire could they build?

The most maligned entry into the entire Mario franchise has to be the Super Mario Brothers movie, a film that explored an alternate history where the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct and evolved into a race led by a Dennis Hopper rendered Bowser. I was surprised when I recently rewatched the movie and enjoyed it. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the reviews had stated, and as Chris Lough wrote in his retrospective for Tor, “There’s only one real problem with the Super Mario Bros. movie: its name.” Even Miyamoto commented: “[In] the end, it was a very fun project that they put a lot of effort into… The one thing that I still have some regrets about is that the movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. video games were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a video game, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself.” (italics mine)

I was stunned that Miyamoto’s main problem with the film was that it remained too faithful to the game, rather than veering off in a completely different direction. Some of its creative ways of incorporating elements from the game proved too disturbing for reviewers, including a younger me who found the small-headed lizard faced goombas as well as the realistically raptor-like Yoshi scary when I first saw it. An older me appreciated all that they tried to do, including centering the romance around Luigi and Daisy, the oppressive fascist society propagated by Bowser, and the only aspect that maintained its visual appeal during its migration to the big screen: the bob-ombs. Dino-Manhattan is a dark and terrifying reflection of our own world if it had squandered all its resources. The set designs had that 80s/90s type of appeal that was grungy, futuresque, and real. No backgrounds constructed fully in CG that make everything look fake and too color-corrected. If the Mario Brothers film was an original work of science fiction, it would probably have had a much better reception than it did. But even as a Mario film, I liked Bob Hoskins’ grouchy take on the iconic hero in conjunction with the more optimistic and naive Luigi.

For me, the biggest issue with the Super Mario film is that it went too far into science fiction side of things without bringing along any of the fantasy elements. Super Mario Galaxy towed the line perfectly, and resulted in one of the greatest games ever developed. Other iterations in the series have also walked that tightrope, most to critical acclaim. In the latest iteration of Mario, Super Mario World 3D, they actually went back to straight fantasy (emphasizing the multiplayer), and while the reviews have been mostly positive, it’s been considered a step back, a retread that doesn’t add anything new.

I know Super Mario Brothers probably falls into the science fantasy or space adventure category more than science fiction because even though it meets most of wiki’s definition for SF, it fails in the plausibility category. No one is going to believe the games could ever be real. That’s part of what makes the film so important to my argument because it bridges the gap, staying faithful to the spirit of the games, at least according to Miyamoto, while somewhat maintaining plausibility. I can imagine an alternate universe where dinosaurs evolved and moved on, though they’d more likely be similar to Star Trek: Voyager’s Voth than Bowser.

Independent of which genre the series falls squarely into, my personal preference for the Mario games are the ones that incorporate elements of science fiction.

That is, other than the American Super Mario Brothers 2, which has always had a special place in my heart because it was so different and magical. I’ve always wondered why Nintendo never made a direct sequel in a similar art style with 2D mechanics (although Super Mario World 3D I mentioned above does allow you to play as any of the four characters). It could be a merging of alternate histories where the Mario films took off and resulted in a bunch of sequels that Mario and crew live through, only to wake up and find out it was all a nightmare. The final boss would be the film Mario vs. the video game Mario. Who would win? It wouldn’t matter as Bowser or another enemy would show up and kidnap someone who would need to be rescued, at which point they’d team up or compete against one another and— hopefully, the cycle never ends and the games keep on evolving as Mario and company take on new mythic battles, one stomp at a time.

This article was originally published in June 2015. Let us know where you think Super Mario Odyssey fits on the science fiction-to-fantasy continuum!

Peter Tieryas is a character artist who has worked on films like Guardians of the Galaxy, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, and Alice in Wonderland. His novel, Bald New World, was listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books as well as Publisher Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of Summer 2014. His writing has been published in places like Kotaku, Kyoto Journal, Tor.com, Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, and ZYZZYVA, and he tweets @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2017/10/24/super-mario-brothers-fantasy-or-science-fiction/feed/1Fighting For Utopia: Revisiting Classic ’90s RPG Phantasy Star IVhttps://www.tor.com/2017/03/27/fighting-for-utopia-revisiting-classic-90s-rpg-phantasy-star-iv/
https://www.tor.com/2017/03/27/fighting-for-utopia-revisiting-classic-90s-rpg-phantasy-star-iv/#commentsMon, 27 Mar 2017 19:00:36 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=260939Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium is an ambitious JRPG that is the perfect end to the series, taking the best elements of each of the previous games and weaving together a “phantastic” journey. It easily goes toe to toe with its more famous Square contemporaries like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. […]]]>

Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium is an ambitious JRPG that is the perfect end to the series, taking the best elements of each of the previous games and weaving together a “phantastic” journey. It easily goes toe to toe with its more famous Square contemporaries like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. Coming after the radical departure from the series Phantasy Star III was with its medieval setting and art style, PSIV (1993 JP, 1995 US) was a welcome return by Director Rieko Kodama and her Sega team to its science fiction roots. It also exemplifies how to do a sequel, as PSIV doesn’t shy away from its ties to the previous games the way III did, but instead, embraces them.

Returning Evil

1,000 years have passed since the events of Phantasy Star II. Mota has reverted to its pre-Mother Brain state following the “Great Collapse” so that it is again a desert planet complete with enormous sand worms. Unfortunately, Dark Force is back for another haunting as well and the perennial battle against evil as the Hegelian representation of “contradiction” is pushed to the extreme; Dark Force seeks nothing less than the negation of all life in the Algol Star System.

Fortunately, good is back too, embodied by another Alys (whose name is almost identical to the heroine of Phantasy Star I, Alis), as well as the latest reincarnation of the series favorite, Lutz. The main protagonist is a young bounty hunter named Chaz who’s been taken under the wing of the more experienced Alys (Chaz shares a similar breastplate to Rudo from PSII in a visual connection that binds them). The two begin investigating the burgeoning presence of monsters throughout the world in a nod to the plot of Phantasy Star II. But unlike the last time, when the problems initially seem the result of a computer error, evil has a face.

The black magician, Zio, is a charlatan who has faced much adversity throughout his life. In desperation, he turned to Dark Force who granted him great magical strength as well as the gift of immortality. Emboldened by his new powers, Zio establishes a church worshipping the embodiment of all things evil. His followers are a group of religious zealots who believe in cleansing the world of the impure and are strongly anti-academic. There’s one moment where a disciple mentions the name of Zio and faints because he’s so in awe. Another citizen has a seizure caused by his own religious fervor for the evil wizard.

The sight of humans fighting so passionately to bring about their own destruction is one that seems absurdly ridiculous on the surface, but oddly reminiscent of the news I’ve been watching of late. What should have come across as an overly evil set of tropes in this replay didn’t seem so alien or foreign, and the capacity of Zio’s followers to delude themselves was uncannily familiar. By coincidence, I’d been reading a William Shirer book about the Third Reich where this particular quote resonated: “Over the years as I listened to scores of Hitler’s major speeches I would pause in my own mind to exclaim, ‘What utter rubbish! What brazen lies!’ Then I would look around at the audience. His listeners were lapping up every word as the utter truth.”

Zio and his army are wreaking havoc everywhere they go. One of the cities that falls under their tyrannical rule is Molcum, which they lay completely to waste. The irony of the religious movement is lost on many of its members, ignorant of the fact that the planet once was a utopia, destroyed by the actions of humans. A thousand years ago, life was pretty awesome, due in large part to the advanced technology and egalitarian social structure. This religious cult intends to destroy any trace of that, and it’s into this situation that you’re thrown into the fray.

Utopia No More

While I feel the worldbuilding in Phantasy Star II was my favorite in the series, PSIV has the most compelling characters. Each has motivations I cared about, whether it’s Hahn, the curious scientist who has to give away his wedding fund to finance the investigations into Birth Valley, or an aggrieved Gryz who seeks vengeance against Zio for his parent’s death in Molcum. The cutscenes are gorgeously drawn in comic book style panels, splashing on top of each other to create a dynamic vibrancy. The closeup facial expression make each team member feel distinct and alive.

I still remember when one of your companions Rei (who is a genetically engineered Numan), emerges from the bio-plant where she’s been her whole life and sees the sun for the first time. She is in awe, gawking openly at the azure skies. The simple joy of that moment, tied together with the memory of her PSII predecessor, Nei, has always moved me.

It’s also hilarious the way Alys tempers her desire to do good with greed, demanding to get paid for every new mission, though doing it with charm. Chaz and Rune jibe each other constantly and provide much of the comic relief. They seem generally hostile, but in a moment of tragedy, Rune actually provides a deeper understanding to the situation that brings comfort to the young bounty hunter. As for Chaz himself, we learn he’s a foreigner with a dark past and it was only through Alys’s help that he was able to find himself.

It’s the overall interactions of the characters that make this game so compelling. There’s a “talk” option where characters can communicate with each other on the field. Often, it’ll act as a hint guide, telling you where you should be heading. But banter abounds as the characters will express personal convictions or rib each other over previous events. Even if aspects of the narrative follows JRPG tropes, that’s not a bad thing when it’s executed in such an entertaining way. The pacing is superb and there’s an immediacy to the sense of action heightened by comic book cutscenes and the musical cues that help the speed, such as the abrupt transition of the battle victory theme.

Your party is always on the move. In Zema, you find all the townspeople have been turned into stone by Zio. You have to make a long trek to Tonoe to find the cure, Alshline. On the path there, you visit multiple towns, defeat swarms of monsters, recruit and lose team members, and after retrieving the cure, are finally rewarded with a cutscene in which you save all the people. The allegorical nature of the petrification takes on more meaning when you realize they were excavating Birth Valley to uncover the scientific secrets behind the spurt in monsters, but were impeded by Zio. It’s technology versus magic, though the ancient technology has failed due to the corruption of Dark Force. What’s interesting is that Zio knows the truth, and doesn’t care. He will do whatever it takes to maintain power, even if it means denying them the advances that could help humanity achieve the utopia they seek.

Five Characters Please

I hate that so many JRPGs give you a huge cast of characters, then only let you take three of them into battle. Thankfully, Phantasy Star IV lets you bring five members into fights. The battle animations are fantastic and I love the SF/Fantasy combination of weapons that includes laconian swords, titanium slashers (essentially boomerangs that hurt all your foes), and plasma launchers.

While JRPGs as a whole have come a long way towards making gameplay more friendly for gamers, it’s the subtle things that can make or break a battle system, vital considering you spend a good chunk of most JRPGs in them. Phantasy Star IV took great strides in making battles a lot more user-friendly for players.

This is the first time in the series you can see your characters fight the enemies and the background environments at the same time (PSII left out environments in favor of Tron like grids, while PSIII had environments, but no character animations). Also, there isn’t a single weak member among your characters (well, maybe Hahn). Everyone has their advantages, which helps you connect with the party members. Seriously, why do some JRPGs give you characters that are lame and worthless?

On the control side, there’s a macro system that lets you program automated battles. This means you don’t need to repeat the same combos over and over. Also, the battle system memorizes whatever technique, skill, or item you selected last to minimize any unnecessary scrolling. To add to the strategic element of macros, there are powerful combination attacks your team members can trigger when they use a list of techniques or skills. Utilizing the macro system is the best way to ensure their activation.

There is a bit of grinding, but nowhere near the level of the other games in the series. The difficulty is well balanced and though the random encounter rate is high, on par with many of its JRPGs contemporaries, it never gets overwhelming. Unlike most games, combat in vehicles is a different beast from regular fights. You actually use the weapons you have aboard the craft you’re in. It’s a nice touch that adds to the sense of immersion. While these new vehicles aren’t as nifty as Wren transforming into an aerojet or aquaswimmer from PSIII, they’re still a great addition in helping you feel like you’re part of the world.

The most important thing is that you feel the care the team at Sega took to make the experience as seamless as possible. Rieko Kodama is one of the most brilliant directors in gaming (her gameography includes Phantasy Star II, Skies of Arcadia, and Deep Fear) and it shows in that PSIV has one of the smoothest battle systems of the 16-bit era.

Phantasy Threads

I love the way Phantasy Star IV ties up many of the loose ends from the series and rewards players who have followed the series. There’s a connection with Phantasy Star III that is a treat for fans, especially as it’s part of a completely optional mission. You discover it in the ruins of a wrecked spaceship that reveals the fate of the Parmanians who escaped the destruction and the computer logs describe their distant travels aboard the massive colony starships. While my feelings toward the dark sheep in the series is mixed, my favorite part of the game, the cyborgs, are back. Wren is as badass and stoic as before (even though it’s actually a different model) and is still a cyborg of mass destruction.

There’s also multiple references to the first Phantasy Star throughout the game. In the town of Termi, you actually find statues of the original heroine, Alis, along with her feline companion, Myau. A more significant connection is the return of the final boss in the original game, Lashiec. You re-enter the old Air Castle to defeat Lashiec once again and discover two thousand years have only made him angrier. It’s a sad ending to a once wise and benevolent ruler, corrupted by Dark Force.

Even the fate of the space pirate, Tyler, who rescued you from the satellite of Gaira (aka Gaila) in Phantasy Star II, is revealed as he eventually landed on Dezolis with the other Palmanian refugees and founded a town on the cold surface. It felt good to learn that they’d not only survived, but were able to start a new life. You use his old spaceship, the Landale, to navigate the stars after your own ship is sabotaged.

At one pivotal point late in the game, Chaz discovers the sacred sword, Elsydeon. That’s when he’s stricken by a vision of all the heroes from the past Phantasy Star games. I choked up seeing Nei as well as the heroes of II whose fate post-game we were never actually told. What moved me though was that it wasn’t just a nod back to the PS games, rather, a nostalgic reminiscence on all the hours I’d spent exploring the rich worlds within JRPGs. I thought of the way they’d shaped many of the important narratives of my childhood and Chaz’s flashback felt like a re-tread through my gaming past.

This is why I play sequels, not just to discover new worlds, but to revisit old ones and find out how things have changed. IV strikes that perfect balance of old and new.

Star Systems

Phantasy Star IV was one of the most expensive games of the time, and I unfortunately couldn’t afford it when I was a kid. So I rented it at Blockbuster and spent every day during that summer break week to beat it. The game is huge and I loved every moment of it. It was as though they crammed the best parts of I, II, and III in to make the perfect mix. I remember thinking multiple times that I’d beaten the game, only to find out there was another villain, and another. I was so happy to finally get my own copy thanks to the wonders of eBay, and I’m glad to report that in this new playthrough, the game not only lived up to expectations, but actually went beyond them. There are no caveats in recommending the game the way I had for Phantasy Star II (thanks in large part to all the grinding you needed to do for II) and it really stands the test of time. The millennium, and the original saga, ended in truly epic fashion.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2017/03/27/fighting-for-utopia-revisiting-classic-90s-rpg-phantasy-star-iv/feed/9Announcing Peter Tieryas’ Next Book: Malleable Realitieshttps://www.tor.com/2016/08/02/malleable-realities-peter-tieryas/
https://www.tor.com/2016/08/02/malleable-realities-peter-tieryas/#respondTue, 02 Aug 2016 15:00:12 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=222853Following the dark, violent, alternate history of United States of Japan delving into the tragedies of WWII, I thought why not follow up with a fun comedy adventure? Malleable Realities is the longest thing I’ve written, both in length, and time it took me. Time is relative, right? But 14 years for one book? A […]]]>

Following the dark, violent, alternate history of United States of Japandelving into the tragedies of WWII, I thought why not follow up with a fun comedy adventure? Malleable Realities is the longest thing I’ve written, both in length, and time it took me. Time is relative, right? But 14 years for one book? A younger me would have been incredulous if he knew it was going to take this much time.

Time is at the core of the story, kickstarted when Lucca from the SNES classic, Chrono Trigger (which I reviewed here at Tor.com in three trope-defying parts), explained the paradox of Princess Marle’s disappearance. I thought I understood the weirdness of time to a certain extent. But then my understanding of the theory of causality took a huge blow after I read David Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. He posited that A + B doesn’t necessarily equal C, something I understood since me playing Chrono Trigger in high school didn’t necessarily make me want to write a time travel story that is now, almost two decades later, Malleable Realities. But CT did spur questions, like is time continuous, and does a past event necessarily lead to a future one if causality is a presumption we assume for convenience?

The Stabilizers, an agency committed to fixing temporal anomalies and acting as a disaster relief force in instances of time storms.

Brent Mayakao is a veteran who is an Originator, one of those rare human beings to whom time responds differently, so that he’s lived a very long time. He played a key role for the Stabilizers in the past, but doesn’t remember why because of battle trauma. Kaira Komine, recently lost her partner and finds solace in her duties which she clings to religiously, trying to make compromises with her partner who is less keen on following the rules.

The two must join forces to help find a mass-murderer who is hunting down Stabilizers because of crimes committed in the future that neither know anything about.

If USJ was about subverting authority, MR is about subverting reality. I wanted to explore the nature of time, reality, and all that entailed with stories that asked things like, what if no one died for a day, or two?; if time is relative depending on gravity and location, what if time was also relative for every individual? So what feels like a minute to me might be two or three to you? What if there were people whom time affected completely differently for whatever reason? Is time a “thing in itself”, kind of like the weather, where disturbances in time can result in temporal hurricanes/anomalies that require a special agency to tackle the ensuing disasters? Or is it just a perceptual interpretation of perpetual entropy?

Malleable Realities really took root when I first joined Electronic Arts. I had moved down to Los Angeles because I was eager to work with the art director of Silent Hill 2 who had joined EA to work on a new James Bond game. But outside of work, I didn’t know anybody. When I look back, it was probably one of the loneliest times of my life. Work became my purpose, my bane, my joy, and the absurd rollercoaster I rode every day. I was in awe, starting at a new studio that was bringing in some of the most talented people in the world. But I was also learning what it meant to work for a big corporation creating video games. That is, insanely awesome at times, and also extremely strange, stuck in a bureaucracy that made Brazil’s office scene tame in comparison as it felt like I had a new manager every few weeks. Still, I met so many people whom I greatly respected and who are still my close friends (I also did meet people who made me wonder if I was inside a videogame making a videogame about working for a videogame.).

It was during those hours at home, not having anything else to do that Malleable Realities took form as a book about an agency devoted to preserving time in which almost no time travel happens. At the end of the day, their job is to “stabilize” time and all its anomalies. A good day for them is when time travel doesn’t happen.

The book is split out into ten cases, kind of like a season of Dr. Who or Star Trek. The titles and descriptions of the first three cases (which is from the synopsis I used to initially pitch the book) can give you an idea of some of the themes:

Reliving a Memory: Brent Mayakao is a disgruntled restaurant manager when everyone around him starts experiencing alternate realities within their own lives. His induction into the Stabilizers is less than pleasant, particularly when he discovers he may be the cause of all the trouble.

Bereft of a Sense: The whole city of Keching has lost its sense of taste and smell. Brent and his new partner, Kaira Komine are sent to investigate, but the whole matter reeks of conspiracy.

Forgetting a Paradigm Shift: An Originator named Tashtego is erasing important historical books throughout time, like the cure for syphilis which could have saved Alexander the Great’s life. Matters get even more complicated when Kaira’s father gets intertwined in the mess and a rival organization to the Stabilizers wants Tashtego’s head as well.

So why the fourteen years? I finished Malleable Realities about the time I left EA, which was two years after I started. But I was so in love with the world and the characters, I didn’t want to let them go. So I kept on iterating on it. Once, twice, twenty times. The number of stories shifted. At one point, there were eighteen stories, though I cut that down to fifteen. But that was already at 350,000, so when I finally sent it to Angry Robot, I actually had cut it down to ten cases which put it at 150,000 words (for some perspective, USJ is approx. 80K). The sequel is mostly written. Two side novels in that universe are half done. I have three novellas with the same cast of characters. And even then, a part of me didn’t want to give it up. But now that I’ve signed the contract, I have no choice since there’s an actual release date in a year. (I actually pushed Angry Robot to give me more time so I could keep on editing, which they generously granted.)

This is not my Moby Dick (even though there are Moby Dick references in the book) and I don’t consider it the epic I’ve been toiling on forever, even though I have been toiling on it forever. That’s because I loved writing it and I hope you will enjoy reading in a way that makes time speed up when you wish it would slow down. And if not, you can always go back in time and stop yourself from reading the book. Now that’d be a good use of time.

Peter Tieryas is a character artist who has worked on films like Guardians of the Galaxy, Alice in Wonderlandand Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. His first novel, Bald New World, was listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books as well as Publishers Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of Summer 2014. United States of Japan, his second novel, was featured in io9, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Lit Reactor, The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog and Popular Mechanics’ most anticipated lists for 2016. You can find Peter Tieryas online at his website and @TieryasXu on Twitter.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/08/02/malleable-realities-peter-tieryas/feed/0Five Books with Deadly Gameshttps://www.tor.com/2016/03/01/five-books-with-deadly-games/
https://www.tor.com/2016/03/01/five-books-with-deadly-games/#commentsTue, 01 Mar 2016 14:00:38 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=206432I love games, and have spent most of my life playing them in one form or another. I’ve worked for two game companies and have been involved in development with different hats ranging from manual writer to technical director. So when I was writing United States of Japan, one of my favorite parts was imagining […]]]>

I love games, and have spent most of my life playing them in one form or another. I’ve worked for two game companies and have been involved in development with different hats ranging from manual writer to technical director. So when I was writing United States of Japan, one of my favorite parts was imagining what video games would be like in an alternate history where the Japanese Empire ruled. Speculative works can always push the boundaries, and as early consoles were intertwined with military research, I pushed gaming technology ahead twenty years from where it was in 1988 in our world, considering Japan would no longer need to undergo two decades of reconstruction. One of those changes involved Yakuza-sponsored gaming tournaments where players put everything on the line. Not like Running Man, but more akin to a virtual first person shooter match where the loser loses their life.

Here are five other books that also have games with deadly consequences.

I had no idea what the book by Koushun Takami was about when I first picked it up. I knew there was a movie based on the book and it was a bestseller in Japan. But when a group of classmates in junior high are subjected to sleeping gas and wake up, only to be informed they’ll be taking place in a deathmatch against each other, I was stunned. Metal collars are placed around their necks that will explode if they try to escape, and they’re each given a weapon ranging from guns to worthless items like a fork. Some embrace the violence, like Kazuo Kiriyama who is a sociopath and relishes his chance to take part in the games. Others try to resist, only to be mercilessly slaughtered. I was both enthralled and repulsed, unable to put the book down but wishing it wasn’t disturbing me so much (the extreme violence resulted in the book being condemned by the Japanese National Diet).

What’s most chilling is how they start to turn on one another and how that forces you to wonder what you would do in their shoes. Morality is turned upside down and the social commentary is disturbing as you realize everything is being broadcast for the public. It’s as though ThePurge were vicariously mixed with something on E!, audiences chowing on sponsored popcorn and soda as analysts commented on the brutality and effectiveness of each killing.

(Note: As much as I enjoyed Running Man and The Hunger Games, I’m leaving them off this list because of the similarities they share with Battle Royale).

The Player of Games is arguably the most entertaining Culture book and probably the best starting point for those interested in Iain M. Banks’s postscarcity universe. Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a master of games, but he’s bored. It’s not just because he’s the best at everything—there are even some games he is not good at. But as he puts it: “I… exult when I win. It’s better than love, it’s better than sex or any glanding; it’s the only instant when I feel… real.” Unfortunately, he rarely feels the same adrenaline from gaming anymore because so few offer him a real challenge.

Enter Contact. They send him on a mission to learn about the ultimate game called Azad that’s integrated into the political and social fabric of the Empire of Azad, setting the stage for an entirely different type of gaming experience. “The game of Azad permeated every level of society… Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance.” Gurgeh initially struggles, embarrassingly for a so called master. But he quickly adapts and begins to excel when he focuses less on the rules of the game and more on the psychology of his opponents. That’s when he learns that the game doesn’t rely on merit alone and various machinations put his life at risk with each victory as those in power don’t like the idea of an alien outsider winning. Gurgeh overcomes using his superior playing skills as well as his coming to understand how the “Culture” is superior to Azad on a philosophical and “cultural” level. I love Gurgeh’s passion for gaming as well as his flexibility and adaptability. But I couldn’t help wonder, if he was bored before the Game of Azad, what will his life be like after it?

Part of why I love games so much is that independent of your background, you can excel with time and practice. I spent a lot of time moving around as a kid so that at every new school I attended, I was an outsider. The way I bonded with other students was talking about our favorite video games and how to beat them. That’s why I don’t like stories featuring young protagonists who are “chosen” as it’s less about them earning their victory and more about them being some arbitrary victor with innate skills. Wade, AKA Parzival, is by no means a chosen one. On the surface, he’s an outcast who doesn’t fit in. But he has a love for OASIS and all things Halliday, a devotion I could relate to. Ernest Cline has created an almost perfect mishmash of every awesome pop-culture phenomenon from the 80s, but brings his own unique sensibility to weave something not just inspiring, but genuinely addictive. I kept on wishing there was a real-world OASIS.

Things take a deadly turn when the corporation, IOI, gets serious about the egg hunt. They want to make OASIS an ad-flooded hell where everything is monetized- kind of the way our browsers would look without ad block x 1000. Is that worth killing for?

I’ve always wondered why Cordwainer Smith doesn’t get more attention. He was one of my favorite writers growing up, introduced to me by my high school AP English teacher. The stories of the Instrumentality, influenced by Smith’s time in China (whose godfather was Sun Yat-Sen), were unlike any other fiction I’d read. They were fueled by a strange imagination that melded outlandish science fiction with Asian myths, epitomized by this short story about pilots, “pin-lighters” who fight off mysterious entities they’ve coined dragons in the deep of space. Since humans by themselves are mentally too slow to tackle the dragons, they need a partner in the form of telepathic cats. These feline companions see it as a game, triggering a miniature nuclear bomb before the dragons can kill everyone on board. The Instrumentality, a government that acts like musical strings, is always present, looming, shaping history that unfortunately enough, often goes into discord. Of course, those are the best parts of the symphony.

Arguably one of the most epic and grand novels ever written, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, based on actual history, is considered one of the four essential classics in China. I’ve read this massive series multiple times, played the games that were inspired by it (the simulation ones, not the beat em’ ups in the form of Dynasty Warriors), watched all the shows, read the 60-volume Manga inspired by it eight times, and been horrified by the terrible English translations.

This example isn’t strictly a deadly game as it is one of the most gut-wrenching scenes involving a game I’ve ever read. General Guan Yu has won a crucial victory against the enemy, but been wounded by a poisoned arrow in the Battle of Fancheng. His surgeon, Hua Tuo, tells him he needs to have surgery to cut the venom out. As Guan Yu is in the middle of a game of weiqi AKA go (a Chinese game which made recent headlines when Google programmed an AI that could beat a weiqi professional), he insists the doctor perform the surgery right there. Guan Yu continues the game while the doctor cuts the flesh open, scrapes the poison off his bone, and even patches it. In the manga, it’s noted the doctor sweated more than Guan Yu. I’m curious how that scene would have played out if Guan Yu was playing against the so-called AlphaGo.

Bonus Round: The Book of Job

I spent a lot of time pondering the fate of Christianity if the Japanese Empire took over. In USJ, they incorporate it into their Shinto pantheon, which brings us to the Biblical Book of Job. If you take Job as fiction, it is one of the most provocative and poetic speculative works ever written. If fact, then the universe is a pretty scary place. God and Lucifer are wagering on a man’s life. Along the way, Job loses most of his family, his worldly possessions, and his health. His friends arrive and duly lecture him on being ungodly and sinful. Job resists them, scandalizing his friends who pontificate with fancy arguments. In the end, there are no answers, no resolution, just a literal deus ex machina as God doubles Job’s blessings after hundreds of questions. Theodicy, or the question of “why do the righteous suffer?” takes on an unnerving perspective from the viewpoint of a game between a creator and accuser. Good thing there’s a restart button.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/03/01/five-books-with-deadly-games/feed/29United States of Japanhttps://www.tor.com/2016/02/11/excerpts-united-states-of-japan-by-peter-tieryas/
https://www.tor.com/2016/02/11/excerpts-united-states-of-japan-by-peter-tieryas/#commentsThu, 11 Feb 2016 15:00:35 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=204704Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible Emperor, and nobody believes that Japan's conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons—a shadowy group of rebels fighting for freedom. Their latest subversive tactic is to distribute an illegal video game that asks players to imagine what the world might be like if the United States had won the war instead.]]>

We’re proud to present an excerpt from Peter Tieryas’ United States of Japan, a spiritual successor to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle,out March 1 from Angry Robot Books.

Most of United States of Japan takes place in 1989 following Captain Beniko Ishimura in the office of the censor and Agent Akiko Tsukino, member of the Tokko (the Japanese secret police). Los Angeles is a technological mecca, a fusion of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Tokyo. During WWII, one of the biggest weaknesses the Japanese Empire had was its dependency on oil to which it had very little access. After their shared victory with the Germans, they prioritized developing solar energy and electrical batteries for all their vehicles. That sensibility is reflected in the entire aesthetic of this new Los Angeles, clean, pristine, grand, and gleaming in neon. At the same time, I wanted to contrast this by showing the dark origins of the USJ. To do this, I felt it was important to know what happens in the direct aftermath of the Japanese Empire’s victory in WWII. This was in part influenced by a visit I made to the Japanese American Museum in San Jose, learning about (and being horrified by) the history of what happened back then. This opening chapter takes place forty years before the events of USJ and is about Ben’s parents who were locked away in a Japanese-American Internment Camp, waiting to find out their fate. —Peter Tieryas

Chapter 1

War Relocation Authority Center #051
July 1, 1948
8:15am

The death of the United States of America began with a series of signatures. Twenty year-old Ruth Ishimura had no idea, imprisoned hundreds of mile away in a prison camp for Americans of Japanese descent. The camp was made up of dilapidated barracks, poorly constructed guard posts, and a barbed fence that surrounded the perimeter. Almost everything was covered in coats of dust and Ruth found it hard to breathe. She shared her room with eleven other women and two of them were comforting one of her roommates, Kimiko.

“They always send him back,” her companions told her.

Kimiko was frayed, her eyes swollen from tears, throat congested with phlegm and dirt. “Last time, they beat Bernard so hard, he couldn’t walk for a month.” Bernard’s only sin was that eight years ago his work took him to Japan for a month. Despite being completely loyal to America, he was under suspicion.

Ruth’s cot was a mess, music sheets scattered over the army blankets. Two of the strings on her violin were broken and the third looked brittle enough to snap at any moment. Her instrument was lying next to faded music sheets from Strauss and Vivaldi. The table, the chairs, even the shelves were built from broken boxes, disassembled crates, and any spare parts they could find. The wood floors were dirty, even though they were swept every morning, and there were gaps she had to be careful not to trip on. The oil stove reeked of overuse and she wished they had something warmer for the freezing nights. She glanced over at Kimiko, who was crying even harder. “This is the first time they’ve kept him overnight,” she said. “They always, always send him back.”

Ruth could see the grim expression on both the women next to Kimiko. An overnight stay usually meant the worst. Ruth sneezed, feeling something stuck in her throat. She pounded her rib cages with the flat end of her fist, hoping her breath would clear. It was early in the morning and already getting hot—weather extremes were normal in this part of the desert. Her neck was covered in sweat and she looked over at the picture of a younger Kimiko, a comely lady who had grown up as heiress to what had once been a fortune.

“Ruth! Ruth!” Outside the barracks, her fiancé, Ezekiel Song, rushed towards the room. “All the guards are gone!” he exclaimed, as he entered.

Ruth rubbed the dust off Ezekiel’s hair and asked, “What are you talking about?”

“The Americans are gone. No one’s seen them all morning. Some of the elders are saying they saw them driving away.”

Ezekiel shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. But I heard the Emperor demanded we all be freed.”

“Why would he care about us?”

“Because we’re all Japanese,” Ruth suggested.

“I’m only half Japanese,” Ezekiel replied. His other half was Chinese and he had a scrawny frame and bent shoulders that made him look shorter than he was. Ezekiel had a tanned complexion from his days working in the fields, his skin dried like a prune in sunlight. He was stout, a boyish charm hidden behind his curly black hair that formed a cowlick. “All the elders said we’re American.”

“Not anymore,” Ruth said, aware even those with a sixteenth of Japanese blood in them had been sent to the Japanese-American prison camps independent of actual citizenship. She was thin like most of the other children, with noodly limbs and chapped lips. She had fair skin, although her hair was a disheveled mess that tangled into twisted knots. In contrast to Ezekiel, Ruth stood with poise and determination, refusing to let the dust unnerve her.

“What’s wrong?” Ezekiel asked Kimiko.

“Bernard’s been gone all night,” Kimiko replied.

“Have you checked Wrath Rock?”

“We’re not allowed.”

“Guards aren’t there anymore. We can go check now.”

The five of them made their way out of the small room onto the prison grounds. There were hundreds of barracks equidistant to one another, arranged into dreary, desolate blocks. A sign read War Relocation Authority Center 51, which someone had crossed out and marked in substitution, Wrath 51. Most of the barrack walls were covered with tarred paper that was peeling away, brittle strips that had worn down from the fickle climate. They’d been layered over multiple times to buttress and strengthen the exterior, but their attempts at thickening the skin had only weakened the overall facade. There was the remains of a school, a baseball diamond, what might have passed as a shop, and the semblance of a community, though most of those were either abandoned or in ruins. It was a prison city with a veil of endless dirt and a scorching sun that imposed its will through an exhaustive haze of suppression.

As the group made their way to Wrath Rock, a crowd gathered around the guard tower in the north-west corner. “Go see what’s happening,” one of Kimiko’s companions said.

Ezekiel and Ruth looked to Kimiko, who ignored the crowd and sprinted towards Wrath Rock without them.

The two approached the guard tower that several of the men had begun to investigate. Both the Issei and Nissei watched raptly, shouting instructions, asking questions every step of the way. Ruth did not recognize most of them; there were the elderly Issei who had been the first to immigrate to America, then the younger Nissei who were born in the States. Everyone was there, from the man with three moles on his pig nose to a lady who was wearing broken glasses, and the twins whose faces had diverged in the wrinkles formed from the way they reacted to the bitterness of their experiences. Suffering was an unbiased craftsman, molding flesh on bone, dark recesses dipping into pores of unmitigated tribulation. Most of the prisoners had only a few changes of clothing, keeping what they were wearing as clean as they could manage. Knit bindings prevented them from falling apart, subtly woven in to minimize inconsistencies in the fabric. The shoes were harder to mask as they were worn down, unable to be replaced, sandals and callused feet being common. There were many teens gathered, curious as to what all the noise was about.

“Make sure the Americans aren’t hiding in a compartment.”

“They could just be on break.”

“Did they take their rations?”

“What about their weapons?”

The ones who searched came back after a few minutes and confirmed that the American soldiers had evacuated their posts, taking their weapons with them.

The commotion that followed mainly revolved around the question of what to do next.

“Go back home! What else should we do?” one of the younger men posed.

But the older ones were reluctant. “Go back to what? We don’t even know what’s going on or where we are.”

“What if there’s still fighting out there?”

“We’ll be shot before we get anywhere.”

“What if the Americans are just testing us?”

“Testing us for what? They’re gone.”

Ezekiel looked at Ruth and asked, “What do you want to do?”

“If this is true and they are letting us go… My parents never would have believed it.”

It’d been several years since the soldiers came to her school class and ordered them to go outside and stand in line. She had thought it was for a field trip or something short because they only let her take one suitcase of her belongings. She cried so much when she discovered it was going to be their final day in San Jose and she hadn’t brought any of her favorite books.

There were gasps and urgent exclamations as people pointed south. Ruth looked where the fingers were aiming. A small column of dust presaged a tiny jeep driving their way.

“Which flag is it?” one of the younger men asked.

Eyes went sharply to the side of the jeep, the dust cloud covering the markings.

“It’s American.”

“No, you baka. It’s a big red circle.”

“Are you blind? That’s definitely American.”

With the jeep getting closer, time seemed to stretch. What was only a few meters seemed like kilometers, and some even thought it might be a mirage, taunting them with the illusion of succor. The sun pounded them with its heat and their clothes were getting drenched from sweat and expectation. Every breeze meant Ruth’s lungs became a miasma of breathlessness, but she refused to leave.

“Do you see the flag yet?” someone asked.

“Not yet,” another replied.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“What’s wrong with yours?”

A minute later, it was close enough to espy the markings.

“It’s someone from the Imperial Japanese Army.”

The jeep came to a stop and a staunch young man stepped out. He was almost six feet tall and wore the brown uniform of a Japanese imperial soldier along with a sennibari, a red sash with a thousand stitches to bring good luck. The prisoners surrounded him and asked, “What’s going on out there?”

Before answering them, he bowed to them. With tears bracing against his brows, he said, “You probably don’t recognize me. My name is Sato Fukasaku and I’m a corporal in the IJA. You knew me as Steven when I escaped the camp four years ago and joined the Japanese army. I bring good news.”

Ruth, like most of the others in the group, was incredulous. The Fukasaku boy was an emaciated fourteen year-old boy who was barely five feet tall when he disappeared. Other boys refused to let him play baseball because he was so small and struck out every time he was at bat.

“What’s happened out there?” one of the women asked.

He looked at them with a giddy grin that belied his soldierly presence and stated, “We’ve won.”

“Won what?”

“The American government surrendered this morning,” he said. “This is no longer the United States of America, but the United States of Japan. Some rebels are on the run and they’re trying to make a stand in Los Angeles, but it won’t last long. Not after yesterday.”

“What happened yesterday?”

“The Emperor unleashed a secret weapon to make the Americans realize they have no chance. Buses are on the way and they should be here soon to take you to safety. You’re all to be freed and provided new homes. The Emperor personally asked that you be taken care of. There are over two hundred thousand of us imprisoned throughout the camps who will now be given new opportunities in the USJ. Long live the Emperor!” he yelled.

The Issei instinctively yelled back, “Long live the Emperor,” while the Nissei, having been born in the States, didn’t know they were expected to yell correspondingly.

Fukasaku shouted again, “Tenno Heika Banzai!” which was Japanese for “long live the Emperor.”

This time, everyone followed in unison: “Banzai!”

Ruth yelled too, surprised that, for the first time in her life, she felt something like awe swell up in her.

Then Ruth saw something she’d never seen before. Coming out of the driver’s side was a woman in full Imperial uniform. She was ethnically mixed as she had blue eyes with her choppy black hair. Fukasaku saluted her and said, “Welcome, lieutenant.”

She waved off his gesture, looked to the crowd with empathetic eyes, and said, “On behalf of the Empire, I honor all of you for your sacrifice and suffering.” She bowed low and kept the stance, signifying her deep feeling. She spoke with a perfect English accent so she must have been Nissei. Ruth realized she wasn’t the only one surprised by the female officer. The prisoners were staring at her, never having seen a male soldier salute a female superior. Ruth’s eyes went to the shin gunto, the army sword that was a form of badge for any officer. “My name is Masuyo Yoshida. I grew up in San Francisco, like many of you, where I had a western identity as Erica Blake. My mother was a brave Japanese woman who taught me the importance of our culture. Like you, I was imprisoned, falsely accused of espionage, and separated from my family. The IJA rescued me and gave me a new Japanese name and identity to cast off my false Western one. We were never accepted as Americans, and it was our folly to seek it. I am now a lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army and you are all citizens of the Empire. All of you will be given new identities as well. We should celebrate!”

From the back of the truck, four soldiers carted out barrels of alcohol.

“Someone go get the cups.”

It wasn’t long before everyone was cheering the Emperor and asking Steven/Sato details about the war. Some of the elders took Lieutenant Yoshida on a tour of the prison grounds. Ezekiel’s face was flushed red from the alcohol and he said to Ruth, “We both should join the army.”

“What will you do? I can do more pushups than you can,” she teased him.

“I’ll get into shape.” He flexed his muscles.

“It looks like a little mouse,” she said, feeling the small bump on his arm. “Did you notice they both have the new Nambu Type 18 semi-automatic pistols?”

“I didn’t even see their guns.”

“The Type 18 is supposed to fix the weaker striker recoil springs and make them much stronger. The older model had 8mm cartridges and—”

Suddenly, there was screaming. Everyone turned around. There were multiple voices wailing from the direction of Wrath Rock. In the shock of all that had transpired, Ruth realized she had forgotten about Kimiko.

Wrath Rock was the only building with three floors in the complex, housing the soldiers as well as a special interrogation center. It was made of red bricks, a big rectangular building with two wings jutting from its sides. Disturbing howls often emanated from the building in the middle of the night, and depending on the angle and strength of the moonlight, it glowed like a crimson stone oozing blood rays. Everyone approaching the building did their best to suppress shudders. The American flag was still waving high above the Rock.

A dozen prisoners had been carried out, emaciated, bloodied, and bruised.

“What happened here?” Corporal Fukasaku asked.

A man wearing only a loincloth with half his hair ripped out shouted, “They killed my brothers and accused me of collaborating with the Empire. I wish I had!” He tried to spit on the ground, but his mouth was too dry to form anything. His scalp was covered with gashes, and his wide nostrils and bulging eyes made him resemble a chimpanzee. He was pulsing with anger and he yelled, “I’m an American and they treated me worse than their dogs.”

The corporal replied, “The Emperor has come to save all of you. He has taken revenge on the Americans for all of us.”

From the front door, Kimiko emerged, holding a body in her arms.

Ruth gasped. It was Bernard, but his legs were missing, only bandaged stumps in their place. Kimiko’s face was wan and there was a shocked stillness in her eyes as though they’d been frozen. Ruth looked at Bernard to see if he was breathing, but she couldn’t tell.

“Poor Kimiko,” Ruth heard someone say. “Their family was so wealthy and now they’ve taken everything from her.”

“The rich had it the hardest.”

Many agreed with deploring nods.

“Sister…” Corporal Fukasaku began.

But, before he could continue, Kimiko demanded in rage, “Why didn’t the Emperor save him? Why couldn’t he have rescued us just a day earlier?”

“I am very sorry for your loss. Please keep in mind that it wasn’t the Emperor who killed your friend, but the Americans. I assure you, the Emperor has taken revenge a hundredfold for what has happened to all of you here.”

“I don’t care about revenge. He’s dead. HE’S DEAD!” she yelled. “If the Emperor was so almighty, why couldn’t he have sent you a day earlier?”

“Calm yourself. I know you’re upset, but speaking against the Emperor is forbidden.”

“Fuck the Emperor. Fuck you. Fuck all Americans.”

“I will only ask you once, and that’s because I know you’re not in a proper mental state. Do not speak against the Emperor or—”

“Or what? He’ll take his revenge? I shit on him and the whol—”

Corporal Fukasaku raised his Nambu Type 18 semi-automatic pistol, pointed at her head, and fired. Her head exploded, brain and blood spraying the ground. She fell over, arms interlaced with her dead boyfriend.

“No one is allowed to speak against the Emperor,” the corporal stated. He holstered his pistol, stepped around Kimiko’s dead body, and went to reassure the other survivors that everything was going to be OK.

Everyone was too stunned to speak. Ezekiel was shaking. Ruth put her arm around him and asked, “Do you still want to be a soldier?” It was as much for herself as it was for him.

She looked back at Kimiko’s body and did her best to hold back tears.

“You have to be strong,” she said to Ezekiel, as she placed his hands on her belly. “For little Beniko, be strong.”

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/02/11/excerpts-united-states-of-japan-by-peter-tieryas/feed/11An Ambiguous Ending: Phantasy Star II Replay (Part 3)https://www.tor.com/2015/12/23/an-ambiguous-ending-phantasy-star-ii-replay-part-3/
https://www.tor.com/2015/12/23/an-ambiguous-ending-phantasy-star-ii-replay-part-3/#commentsWed, 23 Dec 2015 18:00:14 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=200086I can name so many JRPGs I love, but if you asked me to tell you their endings, I’d honestly struggle to remember. Most of them blend into each other in a huge canvas of predictable outcomes that usually result in the hero saving the world, various party members going back to their respective homes, […]]]>

I can name so many JRPGs I love, but if you asked me to tell you their endings, I’d honestly struggle to remember. Most of them blend into each other in a huge canvas of predictable outcomes that usually result in the hero saving the world, various party members going back to their respective homes, and the protagonist uniting with their love interest. Phantasy Star II was a trailblazer for having a totally unique experience that left me literally at the edge of my seat. I’d even put it up there with some of the best endings in any medium that includes Use of Weapons, the original Planet of the Apes, and Hitchcock films like Vertigo and Psycho. When it comes to gaming, titles are sparse for truly amazing endings (that includes contemporary games as well). But ask almost anyone who has beaten Phantasy Star II and they’ll be able to recount the final scene back to you in detail.

The Mother of Brains

After you’ve collected all the Nei weapons, Lutz teleports you up to the Noah Space Station. There, you take out Dark Force, fight off legions of foes, and finally confront the Mother Brain. She gives you the option of walking away, asking, in essence, do you want chaos with freedom, or order in exchange for a form of slavery? Destroying Mother Brain ensures the system will go helter skelter. Or as she puts more bluntly, “You are such fools. If you damage me, the world will be thrown into a panic. Without me, the people of Algo are helpless. They have become too soft and used to comfort. If I were to malfunction, the people would die cursing their fate. If that is your aim, disable me! If not, return now!” At this point, you are given a window with a yes/no option.

The battle isn’t difficult—a combination of the explosive technique megid, snow crown, and attacks using the Nei weapons will destroy Mother Brain’s system. Unfortunately, she wasn’t exaggerating about her importance to the world. Her death leads to the complete collapse of the Motavian utopia. Climatrol and the Biolab are no longer under her control and a tough life awaits the citizens.

But before you can leave, Lutz realizes there’s another presence aboard the ship and urges you to go face it. You walk past Mother Brain’s hall into a chamber filled with an eerie choir dressed in a panoply of colors. Their leader, who looks uncannily human, greets you and admits that they were the ones who built Mother Brain. They reveal that they are from a planet called Earth that destroyed itself long ago and they came here to exploit the star system. The ultimate villains are Terrans, and you, the player, a human being, need to defeat them. The truth that despite all the positive ramifications of Mother Brain, humans could be capable of so much evil to the point of committing mass genocide, was startling. Hadn’t Earth already been destroyed by their past greed? What were they hoping to gain?

A battle ensues, punctuated by anime style portraits of each of the characters in their various battle poses side by side with texts of angry defiance. I couldn’t wait to find out how it all concluded. The shot of Rolf resolutely gritting his teeth had me enthralled.

The game cuts away to a view of space and Dezo. A question is posed: “I wonder what people will see in the final days.” A credit sequence follows climaxing in an unexplained flash of light. The End.

I kept on pressing the buttons on my controller to check if I’d missed something. What happened? Did Rolf win? Did the humans triumph? Would they reestablish control with a new Mother Brain? Or did both parties die? Even when the sequel came out, none of those questions were answered as Phantasy Star III was more of a side story than a continuation of the second part. I couldn’t get the ending out of my mind.

Phantasy Star II’s journey could almost be considered a form of existential alienation. The more you progress, the more isolated you become. The utopianism of Mota seems foreign after the death of Nei and the destruction of Parma. But in Dezo, the religious fervor seems even more repulsive. Neither technology nor spirituality provide any succor. Instead, the party treks on, not knowing what awaits after each dungeon is ransacked of its treasures. I thought about my own ambivalence to tackle Mother Brain. I couldn’t say with absolute certainty that destroying her was the right thing to do, even though I knew I had to for the story to proceed. “Hell is other people” takes on a disturbing new context when those other people turn out to be literal humans attempting to subjugate the star system. Combat is the expression of the party’s reflective anxiety. Their consciousness only finds meaning at the edge of a sword as even their humanity offers no comfort.

What’s important in this final act is that Rolf and company no longer fear death. They’ve acquired, in Monomyth terms, the “Freedom to Live.” In contrast to his earlier reluctance to die on Giara and even his subconscious terror of death as reflected in the mythic battle taking place in his dreams every night, Rolf is finally ready to face it directly. As Joseph Campbell puts it: “He does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment.” In that sense, the actual results aren’t as important as Rolf coming to terms with his mortality.

Still, I wondered what their eventual fate was.

There used to be a thing called the 16-bit wars where kids would argue whether the Genesis or the SNES was the superior console and go on for weeks about why they were right. My main argument for why Genesis was better came down to Phantasy Star II. There was no JRPG on the SNES in 1990 that compared (it would be another four years before Final Fantasy VI) and the closest thing to a competitor was Final Fantasy IV, which, while a great game, could not compete with the vast space epic of PS2. To those of us who’d played it, we spent hours making up stories about what really happened at the end, speculating, even dreaming of sequels.

The Sequels

It would take the fourth part in the series to continue the legacy of the second. Just by fact that Mother Brain didn’t exist a thousand years later, I assumed the humans had been stopped. Phantasy Star IV is spectacular with gorgeous art and gameplay. It also has a much stronger story with better characterizations than the second one. Still, as much as I loved Phantasy Star IV, there was something gritty in the Motavian paradise of PS2 with its immersive science fiction setting that still makes it my favorite. As for the direct sequel, Phantasy Star III, I loved the concept of having multiple generations carve out their destiny on a space colony formed by those who escaped the destruction of Parma. But it took so many steps back from a visual and story-telling perspective, I feel conflicted about it to this day. It does have arguably the best party member of any 16-bit JRPG, a cyborg named Wren. He can transform into a submersible, aquaswimmer, and my favorite vehicle, the aerojet, that lets you fly all over the map. As much as I cherish Final Fantasy’s airships (I’ll be tackling FF9 soon!), I’d rather take an aerojet any day.

Phantasy Star II also has a series of text adventure games which were downloadable on the Sega Meganet, the 16-bit version of an online store. Each of the adventures explores the background of the main characters, expanding on their personalities and motivations leading up to the events of the game. I haven’t played it, though I’ve watched some of the walkthroughs. I can’t say the narratives were compelling enough for me to want to play them further. That, in addition to a clunky interface and almost no visual feedback on the environments has me reluctant to devote hours to it.

After Phantasy Star IV, the series went 3D and online with Phantasy Star Online. There were lots of interesting elements that made it worth checking out at the time, including its tagline, “You are not the only hero.” But it strayed so far from the original games, I found myself pining for a Phantasy Star game in the spirit of the originals.

That’s because whenever people ask me about my favorite games or even favorite works of fiction in general, I think about that first time I heard the story of Phantasy Star II, then got to actually playing it. That sense of wonder, excitement, despair, bliss, and longing is what I look for in every game I pick up. Even now, I wonder about Rolf and his party, what they thought of as they fought against that army of humans. It was the greatest phantasy of my childhood because it never ended.

Peter Tieryas is the author of United States of Japan (Angry Robot, 2016) and Bald New World (JHP Fiction, 2014). His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Kotaku, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He dreams of utopias at @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/12/23/an-ambiguous-ending-phantasy-star-ii-replay-part-3/feed/10A Daunting Ice Planet: Phantasy Star II Replay (Part 2)https://www.tor.com/2015/12/22/a-daunting-ice-planet-phantasy-star-ii-replay-part-2/
https://www.tor.com/2015/12/22/a-daunting-ice-planet-phantasy-star-ii-replay-part-2/#commentsTue, 22 Dec 2015 14:00:40 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=200068Phantasy Star II is one of the greatest JRPGs of the 16-bit era. Its first act was sublime and tragic, a narrative arc that pushed the envelope of storytelling while stirring my 12-year old soul. The second act was less endearing, more of a teenage tribulation wrought with grinding than a genre defining experience. Here […]]]>

Phantasy Star II is one of the greatest JRPGs of the 16-bit era. Its first act was sublime and tragic, a narrative arc that pushed the envelope of storytelling while stirring my 12-year old soul. The second act was less endearing, more of a teenage tribulation wrought with grinding than a genre defining experience. Here is the second part of the Phantasy Star II retrospective where I get a little more into the future of humanity.

The Sad Fate of Parma

After your party defeats Neifirst, the Climatrol begins to break down and the delicate weather balance established on the planet is completely disrupted. Water is overflowing and the whole continent will flood unless you go open up the four colored dams. But you have to learn how to play music first in order to unlock the individual dams using lyrical keys.

The musician who teaches you, Ustvestia, will actually charge your male companions less than the women. His reasoning is that: “He looks cute.” The dialogue was changed for Western audiences and Ustvestia says instead, “He looks smart,” though the price reduction remains. I really liked Ustvestia for making the entire soundtrack available to you by actually performing them live. This great video breaks down why Sega Genesis songs are so memorable, in part attributed to the existence of two audio chips working in conjunction to produce some of the most unique melodies in gaming. I used to plug in earphones in the headphone jack on the Genesis console to listen to the music in full stereo. Phantasy Star II has one of the best soundtracks on the Sega Genesis from the intensity of Pressure to the pivotal boss battle music of Death Place drawing on the opening Phantasy track.

While all the monsters have been vanquished after Neifirst’s defeat, a robot army has been unleashed to take you down (where were they when all the monsters were out of control?). This is where your party member, Kain, a “wrecker” comes in handy as his techniques specialize in robotic extermination.

But an even more valuable party member provides what is probably the most important item of the game. Shir is a thief; unlike most games where thieving happens in battle, she steals randomly from shopkeepers in town, purloining a combination of valuables and rare items. If you strengthen her to level 10 and take her to the baggage claim in the Central Tower, she will steal the visiphone, which lets you save anywhere at anytime (except during battles). For what might be the most difficult JRPG of the 16-bit era, the portable saving system was a godsend. Add to that the fact that Shir is the fastest character in your party, and she’s arguably the most underrated member of your group. Armed with the visiphone, the dams seem much more manageable as you make your way through them. Unfortunately, after you release all four to relieve the flooding, your reward is to be taken captive by a trio of Army Eye sentry robots.

You’re imprisoned in a space satellite called Gaira, stripped of your items and unable to use any techniques. Laser rings restrain motion and painful beams restrict access. The government informs you that you’re here until they carry out their death sentence. Rolf’s vulnerability and weakness is moving in the scene as he declares, “I tried to open the dams because I felt responsible for making too much rain fall, but I was caught. I don’t want to die here not even knowing who was trying to destroy Mota by using the Mother Brain.” Your party has to flee from every fight or they will be overpowered and killed. I’ve written about being helpless and defenseless in games, and this section of Phantasy Star II would be right up there on the list. Just when things seem like they can’t get worse, an explosion rocks the craft and you start plummeting towards the planet of Parma. You hear a burst before everything fades.

Fortunately, you’re not dead yet. But you dream the same nightmare that has haunted you from the opening cutscene. A woman you don’t recognize is fighting against an evil force. When you wake up, a space pirate named Tyler informs you that he saved you just in the nick of time. The satellite you were on collided with Parma (also called Palm or Palma interchangeably throughout the series) and destroyed it. The main planet of the first Phantasy Star and the biggest center of civilization in the star system is gone.

After Nei’s death, I didn’t think anything could make me feel worse. Parma’s destruction did just that. I couldn’t get the question out of my head: did my actions precipitate its destruction? The government was saying so, but were they just trying to put the blame on me? I talked about the implications of reptilian genocide in the Chrono Trigger retrospective. I felt much more conflicted in this instance because even though I hadn’t visited Palm, with the Reptites, at least they were my enemies. I felt devastated that I had both caused the death of millions and prevented it from happening. It’s the Alderaan moment of Phantasy Star and the Kefka moment from Final Fantasy VI combined. I wished I could crawl into a corner somewhere and hide. But a robot army was after us and the party had no choice but to go on the run to the second planet in the Algo Star System, Dezo.

Dances with Dezorians

Dezo is desperate, an ice planet that is as brutally cold and desolate as the sense of guilt that wracked me. The first destination on the planet is the spaceport of Skure, an abandoned station that is infested with monsters. You land your ship without any idea of where you’re going or what you’re supposed to do. The order in how you approach the rest of the game is left in your hands. Just as Mota was all about guiding you from one tubed bridge to the next, Dezo is the opposite, being almost open-world. The sudden freedom is daunting.

The Dezorians are a counter-Mother Brain society. They have rejected the utopian perfection of Mota, believing an over reliance on technology will lead to a civilization’s decline. They worship the holy fire of the eclipse torch which unfortunately seems less comforting than an all knowing AI. In many science fiction or fantasy tales, the Dezorians would probably represent a different type of ideal a la Avatar or Dances with Wolves, an alternative that is more appealing in some way (usually being in tune with nature). But living with the Dezorians feels worse than life back on Mota, and the alien civilization reminds me why I wished Mother Brain was in control. I hated wandering the unforgiving Tundra of Dezo.

When I finally discovered a city, I couldn’t understand a word they said as they spoke a different language (this site tries to decipher the Dezorian language, also revealing that its native name is duTorus^oor buvikvaa). The only way to understand it is to get a universal translator in the form of a Mogic Cap. If you mistakenly get the Magic Cap instead, shopkeepers will charge double the normal price and the citizens will be more deceptive and aggressive.

I wandered the cities, disappointed by the lack of any discernible culture amongst the Dezorians. They seemed like religious automatons spitting back gibberish someone somewhere told them they should say. “The Palm people were punished because they didn’t take good care of the eclipse-torch,” one Dezorian citizen claims, a ridiculously righteous and judgmental thing to say after an entire planet has been annihilated.

Tedious Questing as Atonement

Dezo essentially amounts to a snowy hub where you undergo multiple fetch quests while combating an interminable onslaught of monsters. I made my way through as quickly as I could. Quickly, of course, is a relative term, as you’ll be fighting enemies every step of the way. In the first part of the retrospective, I mentioned I have Phantasy Star II in the Genesis collection for GBA and PS2. For the purposes of this walkthrough, I used an emulator and turned off random encounters for long stretches. Even then, it took me a long time to navigate Skure and the Crevice as I kept on getting lost and running into dead-ends.

It was almost by accident that I finally reached the Esper Mission, a place whispered about by suspicious Dezorians. There, I met Lutz, one of the main characters from the first Phantasy Star. After waking from his hibernation, he informs you that in order to prepare for the final battle, you need to collect all the Nei weapons. He sends you off to tackle the four dungeons with the hardest enemies in the game.

The story revelations in the second act are disappointing. Lutz informs you that he saved you during a space mission when you were young and an accident killed your parents. It also turns out you’re the descendant of Phantasy Star’s heroine, Alis, though its significance was lost on me as I hadn’t played the first game at the time. Unfortunately, these two revelations are never mentioned again and a part of me has wondered if cartridge memory restrictions prevented further exploration of Rolf’s origins.

As for the Nei treasures you have to find, I initially thought your fallen companion, Nei, had left the special equipment for you, giving the journey a special significance. Admittedly, it didn’t make sense how she could place these weapons in four separate dungeons a whole planet away. But I didn’t question it back then. Just recently, I learned Nei means “ancient” which makes more sense although it decreases the emotional impact of the quest. The four dungeons are meant as a rite of passage for the heroes. Each of them are twisted labyrinths, mind numbingly difficult and complex. There’s a mix of gothic statues, genetically engineered trees, and antiquated architecture designed to get you lost, whether through the hole-ridden depths of Ikuto or the wing-like array of Menobe.

There’s no way to get around it. This whole middle section of the game isn’t very fun. There’s almost no redeeming nature to it and it felt like punishment for failing to save Parma. I was in an alien Siberia, paying one random battle after another. Even if it was atonement for my failure to save the Parmans, the whole process was tedious and RSI-inducing.

You need a whole lot of patience and endurance to collect all the Nei weapons, even though it’s never specified what lies beyond. Rolf is driven by his desire to learn the truth and prevent a Parma-like catastrophe happening to anyone else. But it’s an arduous road. This is the part where most of my friends gave up and put the cartridge away, even with the invaluable hint guide helping them. Understandably so as the second act is extremely difficult. At the same time, it’s unfortunate because if they had persisted, their redemption would have climaxed in one of the best concluding acts in gaming history.

Peter Tieryas is the author of United States of Japan (Angry Robot, 2016) and Bald New World (JHP Fiction, 2014). His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Kotaku, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He dreams of utopias at @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/12/22/a-daunting-ice-planet-phantasy-star-ii-replay-part-2/feed/4Gaming Utopia: Phantasy Star II Replay (Part 1)https://www.tor.com/2015/12/21/why-phantasy-star-ii-is-one-of-the-best-jrpgs-of-the-16-bit-era-part-1/
https://www.tor.com/2015/12/21/why-phantasy-star-ii-is-one-of-the-best-jrpgs-of-the-16-bit-era-part-1/#commentsMon, 21 Dec 2015 16:00:27 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=198623When the topic of the best 16-bit Japanese role-playing games comes up, most people think of the Squaresoft games like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana. But my favorite 16-bit JRPG was a game developed by Sega for the Genesis called Phantasy Star II—one of the first JRPGs to take place entirely in […]]]>

When the topic of the best 16-bit Japanese role-playing games comes up, most people think of the Squaresoft games like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana. But my favorite 16-bit JRPG was a game developed by Sega for the Genesis called Phantasy Star II—one of the first JRPGs to take place entirely in a science fiction setting. The quest spanned two planets, had a cast of eight characters, and featured dramatic twists that made for some dark commentary on human nature. It also set the stage for titles like Xenogears and Star Ocean with its futuristic take on JRPGs, rather than the fantasy background almost all had before then. I’ll delve into what makes Phantasy Star II so special, starting with one of the first utopias in gaming.

The Phantasy in Star

Dystopias get featured a whole lot across the various mediums, but utopias are a rarer breed. Phantasy Star II starts you off in a utopia that seems pretty awesome on the surface. The geological implications of the world have a stronger impact if you played the first Phantasy Star and visited Motavia which was previously a desert planet. Think Dune, complete with giant sandworms, and you’ll have a good idea of what it used to be like. A thousand years later, Motavia has transformed into a paradise. Many of the citizens you meet in the capital, Paseo, don’t work, and instead lounge about in luxury. Everything is provided by an AI system similar to a Culture Mind (a la Iain M. Banks) called Mother Brain. There’s a techno-futuristic look to the townspeople with their varied hair colors and the art deco fashion styles. There’s also a uniformity in their appearance which I now realize was the result of limited memory space, but originally attributed to the guided cultural conformity of a planned society.

The worldbuilding in Phantasy Star II is fantastic, probably the best in any 16-bit era game—it isn’t shoved down your throat, but naturally expressed through the environment. There is limited exposition, but it’s integrated almost seamlessly into the game mechanics. Your “save states” are actually data storage areas where you can store memories, similar to the way the Culture downloads your brain. If you die, you’re not miraculously resurrected, but rather cloned by an eerie Joker-esque surgeon at the clone labs. Weapons are high tech and include salesmen who look like punk rockers. The available equipment ranges from guns to slicers and even the health potions have techy names like monomate, dimate, and trimate. The weather is perfectly regulated by the Climatrol. The biosystem lab grows creatures to balance the biomes of the world. The music is upbeat and super catchy, representing the optimism that pervades. The people are carefree and indifferent to the woes of the world. “Why should I work for a living?” asks one kid. Another says, “My dad is just goofing off everyday. He says he can live without working.”

When tragedy actually strikes and monsters run rampant, the citizens are shell-shocked, not sure what they should do. Part of why the story works so well is because the social structure feels organic with each element propping up the utopian vision of the future. You, as an agent of the government, are fighting to protect this seeming perfection.

Rolf is the main protagonist, an orphan whose prowess with the sword garnered the attention of the government. He’s haunted by nightmares involving the heroine of the first Phantasy Star, all presented in gorgeous anime fashion. Your first companion, Nei, is a half-biomonster, half-human hybrid who was also orphaned and forms a sibling-like relationship with Rolf. Assembling a crew of companions that each have their own troubled past (which is actually explored in a visual novel based on the game), you’re given the task of finding out what’s gone wrong with Mother Brain. For some unexplained reason, the biosystem is generating vicious monsters rather than the creatures that should be supporting the world. The problems of the utopia aren’t necessarily endemic to the system, but rather, in the corruption of the central computer.

Phantasy Star II was massive, an interplanetary conflict that made me feel like I was only a small cog in a grander machine. For most of the story, you’re not actually able to alter the main events in any way way. Rather, you focus on discovering what’s transpiring while doing your best just to survive. My characters were growing stronger and the world had its own rhythm; fight monsters, teleport to different cities, save my memories on a data storage unit, then wander the lush greenery of Motavia.

The first stretch of this narrative has always had particular significance for me. I was in my early teens when a friend’s older brother described the space odyssey to me. I was incredulous, having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this was actually a game. Until then, I hadn’t seen the Sega Genesis and the best RPGs I’d played were all on the NES with primitive 8-bit graphics and only the most basic of plots. What he was talking about seemed more like a movie or a science fiction novel. But he assured me it was real and when I got to actually play it, I was in total awe. It was better than I could have imagined.

“Mother Brain is essential to our life, but nobody knows who made Mother Brain or where it is,” someone points out to you. I had no idea who the actual developers behind Phantasy Star II were, but the game quickly became essential to me.

Before Aeris/Aerith

The biggest leap 16-bit RPGs made from its predecessors was introducing gamers to characters that weren’t just blank avatars we could project ourselves onto, but individuals we could empathize with and root for. I think a big part of why so many gamers cherish those 16-bit RPGs was because it was the first time we experienced myths and heroes we cared about. At the same time, they were all our own. There’s almost a generational devotion to the games in the sense that it was something adults didn’t get and many times, dismissed entirely.

For many gamers, Aeris’s death in Final Fantasy VII represented the first moment in their personal monomyth where they “crossed the threshold.” Her death meant “leaving the known limits of his or her world and venturing into an unknown and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are not known.” In other words, the stakes were high when a character you got attached to could be killed. While Aeris’s demise shocked me, there were two moments in earlier JRPGs that shook me up even more. The first was when Kefka from FFVI pulled off his worldly apocalypse. The second was the death of Nei in Phantasy Star II. Context is really important here. Until then, most characters were archetypes representing fantasy tropes defined by class: warrior embodies strength, a black mage has offensive spells, while a white wizard is a healer, etc. The characters in Phantasy Star II were much more interesting, particularly Nei.

Nei was your best friend and an incredible warrior. One of the most useful features in the game is that characters use both their hands to attack. Bigger weapons like shotguns and swords require both hands, while smaller melee weapons allow dual attacks. Nei wields two claws and unleashes blow after blow on your enemies. For me, she always seemed to attack when I was weakest, dispatching foes in the nick of time. Battles were arduous—an aspect which I’ll get more into in the next section—but having Nei by your side felt essential, particularly as you dived into the mysteries of the biolab.

Investigating the biolab is one of the creepiest sections in the game. The monsters are brutal and attack in relentless waves. There’s stasis chambers everywhere containing the skeletal embryos of bizarre creatures. Chemicals are leaking over the ground. You have to drop into the basement to recover the recorder with the data you need. When you return it to HQ, you discover the whole system has inexplicably gone awry, punctuated by an energy leak at the climatrol system.

After a long quest involving underwater gum and a trek through the labyrinthine climatrol, you reach the center. Someone who looks almost identical to Nei is waiting there. She introduces herself as Neifirst and explains she is a failed bio-experiment who was targeted for extermination by the humans. When they failed to kill her, she vowed vengeance and wreaked havoc through the monsters at the biolab. Your party gets ready to fight her but she tells you if any harm comes to her, Nei will also die as their existence is conjoined. You have the option of avoiding battle if you wish, but the game won’t progress unless you do.

In the first part of the battle, Nei faces off in a direct combat with Neifirst. No matter how strong Nei is, Neifirst kills her. At that point, the whole sequence switches to an animated cutscene as Nei mutters her last words: “There’s no hope left for me. Please, Rolf [“Entr” in the version pictured] don’t let them ever repeat the mistake they made when they made me. I hope everyone on Algo can find happiness in their new life.” Then she dies.

I was sad, furious, and heart-broken.

Rolf and your party face off against Neifirst in a long battle. But even after you beat her, it doesn’t change Nei’s fate. It’s a bittersweet turn and in the last cutscene: “Rolf calls Nei’s name once again. But his plaintive cry merely echoes and re-echoes.” You rush to the cloning factory to try to bring Nei back, but it’s not possible. She’s permanently dead.

Games are our modern myths, more powerful than almost any other medium in the way it lets you experience the events directly. I’d never had a party member I actually cared about die permanently. There wasn’t any way I could change the outcome. I didn’t know game developers were allowed to do that. I was angry at the humans who created Neifirst, furious that I’d failed Nei, and confused now that the utopia was starting to implode after the climatrol system was destroyed. Had I made matters worse?

Hell is Random Battles

The biggest impediment to anyone interested in either playing Phantasy Star II or revisiting it is the endless grinding. The random combat is brutally repetitive and you will have to spend countless hours leveling up your characters just to make it through the next dungeon. I know that’s a staple of JRPGs, but Phantasy Star takes that to the umpteenth level, making old school gaming downright masochistic. You will die a lot. There was one cheat I utilized as a kid: if you bring up the dialogue box with every step you take, you can actually avoid random encounters. That comes in pretty nifty if you’ve run out of a telepipe or escapipe and barely have any HP left after a long grind session. Die, and it’s back to your last stored memory (I’ll be honest. I have two copies of the game, one in GBA form and the other in a PS2 Genesis Collection, so I didn’t feel bad loading this up on an emulator and using a PAR code to level up).

I loved the fact that the battles take place in a virtual battlefield with a Tron-like grid. You can program your attacks to automate them to a certain extent, even though you can micromanage each move if you choose. The animations are superb, both for the main characters as well as the strange bestiary of foes. The 3D backdrop of the battles plays well with the futuristic theme. The creature sound effects are some of the most unnerving ones around, giving each of them an alien vibe. In contrast, even the SNES Final Fantasy games were lacking in enemy and player combat animation, and very few had the type of sound effects Phantasy Star II did. Even its sequel, Phantasy Star III, took a big leap backwards in the battle system with almost no animation and static enemies, which made the grinding even more laborious.

One big gripe I have about the series as a whole is that their magic names are an almost indecipherable slew of techniques that go by names like Gra, Foi, and Zan. All these years later, even after looking them up, I can’t recall what each of them do. At least the ensuing effects were pretty.

Humans and Monsters

The best science fiction doesn’t just present a fascinating new world, but gives us glimpses into human nature from a different, somewhat subversive, perspective. As graphically advanced as the game was, none of it would have worked without the themes that propelled them. One theme that seems to come up repeatedly is best summed up by one of the townspeople: “What’s most frightening is humans, not monsters.”

In the case of Neifirst, ruthlessly hunted down by humans, it was their own actions that had caused so much mayhem and ultimately resulted in the destruction of life on their planet as they knew it. That one act of evil resulted in an imbalance of monsters that caused many civilians to turn to a life of banditry. You see its effects in one of the early cities you enter which has been been ransacked by the rogues, driven to desperation by the shift. They’ve kidnapped a man’s daughter and killed many in their way. Mother Brain seems like a welcome boon, a necessary presence to impose civil order.

Too bad you’ve disrupted the whole climatrol system and caused havoc on the planet. The government is after you. Even though the monsters are vanquished, robotic soldiers are everywhere in their attempt to subjugate your party. The environment is a mess and Mota seems like it will face an imminent catastrophe. When you talk with one of the villagers, wondering if they are panicked, concerned for their well-being and future, he instead happily says, “Now that those Biohazards are gone, we can live without working again.”

Oh brave new world that has such people in it.

Peter Tieryas is the author of United States of Japan (Angry Robot, 2016) and Bald New World (JHP Fiction, 2014). His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Kotaku, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He dreams of utopias at @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/12/21/why-phantasy-star-ii-is-one-of-the-best-jrpgs-of-the-16-bit-era-part-1/feed/5Silent Hill 4: The Room is the Most Terrifying Game in the Serieshttps://www.tor.com/2015/10/22/silent-hill-4-the-room-is-the-most-terrifying-game-in-the-series/
https://www.tor.com/2015/10/22/silent-hill-4-the-room-is-the-most-terrifying-game-in-the-series/#commentsThu, 22 Oct 2015 13:00:04 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=193375Silent Hill 4: The Room is the best Silent Hill game after the second one and one of the most original horror games ever developed. If SH4 hadn’t been part of the Silent Hill series, it’d probably be considered one of the most unique games in the genre. Part of what makes it so distinct […]]]>

Silent Hill 4: The Room is the best Silent Hill game after the second one and one of the most original horror games ever developed. If SH4 hadn’t been part of the Silent Hill series, it’d probably be considered one of the most unique games in the genre. Part of what makes it so distinct is that it goes against the formula of what we’d come to expect of the series. Many gamers, including myself, were initially turned off by how drastically it had changed. But once the expectations faded, a horrifying experience awaited, unrelenting in its oppressive terror.

Room 302

A big part of why most of the recent Silent Hill games have been underwhelming is because they tried to outdo what was essentially narrative perfection in Silent Hill 2. The story is a trek through madness, guilt, and personal horror projected subconsciously into some of the most gruesome monsters ever seen. The climax is both revolting and satisfying, a narrative twist that makes the jigsaw puzzle of Sunderland’s journey a Rosetta Stone of death.

As much as I enjoyed parts of Homecoming, Downpour, SH3, and Origins, they felt more or less the same games, only rehashed. In short, protagonist has issues in Silent Hill, an evil cult causes a whole lot of trouble, and we wish we’d never entered the hellishly foggy suburbia. Revelations uncover a dark past that can be resolved in a number of different ways. Awesome sound effects and music from Akira Yamaoka (and Daniel Licht for Downpour and Memories) scare the crap out of us. Occasionally, a UFO reveals its grand machination to take over the world. Rinse and repeat.

SH4 began as a side story with loose connections to the series before becoming a full-fledged sequel. Because of its tangential origins, Team Silent was able to experiment and innovate on some of the core ideas in the series, sometimes scrapping them altogether. The Room’s biggest achievement is that it makes mundane, every day living, horrifying. At least with the previous three Silent Hill games, I felt like I was transported to a place that was far away, a slice of American life seen through the prism of Japanese developers.

SH4 brought the terror home. Henry Townshend is stuck inside of his own apartment and can’t leave. To highlight the feeling of familiarity, all the sequences in the apartment are in first person mode. It’s you who’s chained in and taken captive with no explicable reason. A claustrophobic atmosphere pervades and in the tight space you call your apartment, there’s no food, the phone is disconnected, and the television is shut off. It also didn’t help that the first time I played SH4, I lived in an Apt. #304, just two doors away from the game’s Room 302.

The voyeurism of spying on your neighbor and the people across from you, a la Hitchcock’s Rear Window, is both creepy and addicting. You can look out the window and see people going about their lives, all of them oblivious to what you’re going through. One of the most disturbing interactions I had didn’t even revert to the typical scare tactics most games use—you know, gory monsters and agonizing shrieks punctuated by alarming music. Rather, it takes place mostly in “silence.”

Alerted by neighbors, the superintendent checks up on your room, knocking on the front door, even using the spare key to try to enter. He is unable to get past the chains and despite your pleas for help, he can’t hear a thing. He eventually writes you a note and slips it under the door. When you look at it, it’s covered in blood, undecipherable. The superintendent then murmurs how reminiscent this is of the last time, and I’m thinking, what last time and what in the world happened to the slip? For the next few peeps out your front door, you’ll see him standing in the hallway, troubled, unable to articulate his fears. Just by staring at his troubled, polygonal face, powerless to help yet knowing what awaited me, I felt terror. Not only was aid from the outside world going to be impossible, but the dude outside pretty much knew I was screwed.

The game’s protagonist, Henry Townshend, is bland and generic. He has no connection to the villain, no demons that need exorcising. Unlike the previous Silent Hills, the monsters aren’t projections of the hero’s subconscious fears and guilts. It might seem like a major negative, but Henry is designed as a projection of the gamer, a blank avatar that just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. By trade, he’s a photographer, which is the perfect profession for a main character whose principal purpose is to observe and understand. At times, the voyeurism verges on the perverse, and it’s an odd way of embodying the sacrament of “wisdom.” His journey through the womb-like tunnels signify a ghastly rebirth. What’s most fascinating is the void in Townshend’s personality allows the main arc to center around the serial killer, Walter Sullivan, whose nightmarish wonderland we’re sucked into via the toilet hole from hell. Each of his victims populates these ghoulish bubble worlds, encapsulated and scarred by Silent Hill’s signature cult, The Order. The deadliest of these worlds is the Water Prison and a great example of what makes SH4 so good.

The Water Prison

A panopticon is conceptually one of the most efficient prison systems conceivable. A single watchman sits in the middle of a circular prison and observes all the cells around him. The inspection house has a one-way mirror into each room so that none of the prisoners know who is being watched at any given moment. It’s intended to produce paranoia, insecurity, and dread.

SH4’s Water Prison is a panopticon used by the Order to control the orphans it had under its care. It’s also a symbolic projection of Sullivan and his relationship to his victims, all of whom he is keeping tabs on. Sullivan was tortured here as a child, and his friend, Bob, disappeared at the hands of Andrew DeSalvo, a guard in the prison. As Townshend navigates the arcane spirals of the tower, he begins to understand the inhuman events that took place there. Most of these revelations come from notes he uncovers, some nonchalantly describing gruesome acts, others from orphans who are going mad. From the bloody beds and the holes built to efficiently dispose of corpses, to the brutal torture hall in the basement, this branch of the Silent Hill Smile Support Society was anything but a happy place for its inhabitants.

The first visit to the prison is relatively harmless. There are very few foes, though the Twin Victim monsters make their debut here as the conjoined reincarnation of Sullivan’s 7th and 8th victim (their baby faces clash in innocence and agony, making for a ghoulish coupling). The puzzles aren’t very difficult either (spinning the tower floors to line up the death pits). But it’s the way the story is so integrated into the architecture that makes this part so unnerving. Up until then, many of the creepiest settings in the SH games were rusted, industrial versions of their counterparts in the light world. They were scary, but more because they looked like hell factories enshrouded in night, decay, and headless mannequins. In SH4, the Water Prison isn’t set in a dark, twisted parallel universe, but is based on reality. Children were being tortured there in the most horrendous ways. The scariest part is that it feels like a believable place, grounded in the history of actual prison sites (the whole idea of a panopticon was philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s way of trying to devise a jail system that was more cost-effective). Human behavior at its worst is incomparably more diabolical than monsters at their most villainous. The atmosphere exudes with palpable suffering, giving us intimations of the tragedy of Sullivan’s past.

The whole prison has the psychological effect in turning the tables against DeSalvo. Rather than the pity or sympathy we feel when we first see him begging for his life outside his prison door, he begins to elicit disgust. Sullivan, the serial killer, actually becomes a sympathetic figure. When DeSalvo is found dead in the torture room, I’m willing to bet few gamers shed tears. It’s a labyrinthine allegory of Sullivan’s mind that’s making our own judgement just as murky. You literally need to shine a light all the way to the depths to complete the sequence.

19/21

The second half of the game has received a lot of criticism and is the biggest reason the game is maligned by fans. In part, it’s because you have to revisit all the levels while escorting Eileen, who has arguably some of the worst AI in gaming. But it’s also because the difficulty level makes a sudden spike into almost nauseating painfulness. Towing the line between being frustrating and challenging is one of the toughest balancing acts designers face.

I thought Team Silent did a great job in inducing a sense of helplessness, a motif that permeates the game. I haven’t felt this vulnerable in a Silent Hill game, or any other horror game outside of Amnesia, since. You sprint from one area to the next, Eileen limping next to you. She is not only easy prey for the enemies, but you can damage her as well. At times, this can be trying, especially since you’re unable to permanently ward off the invincible ghosts without one of the rare swords. But it also forces you to plan out your approach and get a good sense of the layout.

While the levels are recycled, each of them has new camera angles, making them feel like different locations. The unsettling perspective often precludes your front view, making the sudden appearance of monsters startling. The worlds are connected by stairs that are somewhat like the umbilical cord tying the tragedy together, and the maddening cohesion gives you a deeper appreciation for the geographical manifestation of Sullivan’s tattered psyche. In many of the other Silent Hill games, the best tactic is to run away from enemies, sprinting through the danger zones without really being able to soak them in. That isn’t the case with SH4.

In the second visit to the Building World, there’s a pet store where a brutal massacre took place. The first time through, I pretty much forgot it. The second time though, three ghosts ambush you between the shelves and the changing camera angles make it feel like the store itself is trying to kill you. When you uncover its dark past through newspapers on the ground and you hear the echoes of the bullets that destroyed it, it all clicks. Sullivan’s mind isn’t just channeling his own suffering, but those around him as well.

Personalization is an important aspect of the game. The most difficult ghosts you face are the people you saw get killed by Sullivan earlier, giving you a morbid sense of connection to them. I was still wracked by guilt that I hadn’t been able to save one of the victims, Cynthia, in the subway station. Later, she unleashes a Bayonetta styled hair attack that sucks you dry as she pursues you from one train to the other. I hated their presence, but at the same time, understood why they were so raving mad in the afterlife.

Eileen’s mental states begins to deteriorate as she gets hurt by all the ghosts. But what’s more interesting is that she can’t be killed. Usually, escort missions are so annoying because your companions need constant rescuing before they die. In SH4, her damage level only impacts the ending you’ll get. You can completely neglect her, or take pains to prevent her from taking any hits. She’s another layer in the psychological Rorschach of your gameplay and her state is a reflection of your own attitude towards her. It also mirrors Walter’s relationship with his parents, a disturbing thread to say the least.

You can’t ever let your guard down as SH4 will leave you breathless, panicked, and anxious.

A maniacal Walter Sullivan only exacerbates the situation, taunting you with a chainsaw throughout the levels, impervious to your attacks. At least you can tunnel your way back and find solace in your apartment…

Actually, scrap that. Your apartment becomes haunted. The disintegration happens at a slow crawl and ends in a torturous avalanche. Your room no longer heals you and will at times drain your energy. Windows shake, a blood-drenched apparition of yourself appears in your peephole, a ghost tries to break into your apartment, Robbie the Rabbit is staring at you with blood on his cheeks, and angry doll babies haunt your item box (damn you Sullivan for giving me that Shabby Doll!). There is no haven, no escape. The terror becomes ubiquitous.

21 Sacraments

I’ll admit, when I first started The Room, I had lots of reservations. I was confused the game had strayed so far from the best in the series. Even the character models did not seem as haunting or graphically visceral as the ones in the first three. Silent Hill 2 was not only one of my favorite horror games, but one of the best gaming experiences I’d ever had. In fact, about a decade ago, one of the main reasons I decided to leave LucasArts for EA was so I could work with the art director and principal designer of Silent Hill 2, Sato Takayoshi, who had left Konami after SH2. Here was the man who’d taken what might be considered the drawbacks of the uncanny valley and made it into a distinctive style. His attention to detail was inspiring and his insights into the mythos of Silent Hill 2, as well as game design in general, helped me to understand gaming in a very different light. I didn’t think SH2 could ever be topped.

The moment my perspective on that changed was when I was in my real living room (#304, remember) after playing The Room. It was late and I heard my neighbors talking right outside my apartment door. I got creeped out and checked the peephole. I didn’t recognize them. Who were they? What were they talking about? Were they conspiring against me? I was mixing up the horror of SH4’s eponymous room with my own in real life.

I began to appreciate the game for its own merits rather than wondering why it wasn’t another retread of James Sunderland and Heather Mason’s journey. As I looked at all the elements in play, from the grim radio broadcasts, to the needling sound whenever a ghost approaches, to the seemingly interminable escalator ride in the train station, and the panoply of surreal hospital rooms, I realized SH4 paid tribute to the series without being bound by it. There were genuine terrors that had me sweating with fear. Not even Silent Hill 2 had me terrified of my own apartment. And while Sunderland’s personal revelation at the end of SH2 is one of the most shocking twists in gaming, SH4’s surprise “room” is pretty damn appalling too, capturing both the madness of Sullivan, as well as the insane extent to which he’ll go to be with his mother again.

With the news that P.T./Silent Hills is canceled, or at least put on hold, I’ve wondered what direction the series will go if it ever picks back up. A big reason people were so thrilled by P.T. was because it changed the formula so much, even incorporating aspects that many gamers felt were reminiscent of SH4. If the Silent Hill series ever does come back from the dead, I hope they’ll follow in the spirit of The Room, innovating and trying out new ways to terrify gamers instead of clinging to the previous tenets of the Silent Hill formula like they were sacrosanct. Until then, you’ll find me sleeping with all the lights on, wondering what the strange noises coming from my bathroom are.

Peter Tieryas is the author of United States of Japan (Angry Robot, 2016) and Bald New World (JHP Fiction, 2014). His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Kotaku, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He is still afraid of his room and vents at @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/10/22/silent-hill-4-the-room-is-the-most-terrifying-game-in-the-series/feed/14Chrono Trigger Replay Part 3: A Death in the Familyhttps://www.tor.com/2015/09/24/chrono-trigger-replay-part-3-a-death-in-the-family/
https://www.tor.com/2015/09/24/chrono-trigger-replay-part-3-a-death-in-the-family/#commentsThu, 24 Sep 2015 14:00:15 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=189781Welcome back to the replay of Chrono Trigger! Last time we covered the destruction of Zeal, and ended with your first major battle with Lavos… It’s a trope that the older we get, the more we fear death. All these years later, Crono’s death during that first confrontation with Lavos still shocks me. Usually, the […]]]>

Welcome back to the replay of Chrono Trigger! Last time we covered the destruction of Zeal, and ended with your first major battle with Lavos…

It’s a trope that the older we get, the more we fear death. All these years later, Crono’s death during that first confrontation with Lavos still shocks me. Usually, the repercussions of any gaming death are easily fixable with a continue or extra life. He’s the main character. He’s not supposed to die, right? But no, Crono was really dead. For a silent hero, Crono’s actions sang volumes just by his willingness to sacrifice himself without a moment’s hesitation. Even Magus, the arch villain until that point, appears shocked. And if you’re strong enough, you can go fight Lavos again without Crono and beat the game.

Originally, Chrono Trigger writer, Masato Kato, wanted to keep Crono dead. To continue the mission, the party would actually have to recruit a younger version of Crono. But Square deemed it too depressing and requested that the rest of the story be written in a way that he can still be saved. Depending on your perspective, the next sequence was either the most intriguing rescue mission devised, or the cheesiest part of the game. The characters use a time egg to initiate the eponymous “chrono trigger” and save Crono’s life. I really liked it and even if it was a bit deus ex machina, I thought it was a clever use of time travel, though it did make me wonder, if they could freeze time like that, why not also kill Lavos in the process?

It’s after this point that Chrono Trigger essentially becomes open world and open time. You can go anywhere, anywhen, and undertake multiple sidequests. It’s one of my favorite parts of the game because many of the adventures are character-driven segments that reveal more about your party members. I also appreciated how every decision you make impacts the ending and the way the quests play out. If anything, it’s an allegorical representation of time with all its branching pathways.

The Second Trial and the Origin of Robots

Almost every character gets a subquest, and my favorites were those involving Marle and Robo. In the first part of the retrospective, I wrote about how much I enjoyed the trial sequence. I didn’t know there was actually a second trial and it was Marle’s father, the king of Guardia, who was put in front of the jury. Accused of stealing a rainbow shell, a powerful relic that could be crafted into the best weapons, the trial only happens if you find it in the past and leave it with the king of Guardia at that era for safeguarding. In that sense, you’re responsible for the judicial woes of the monarch in the present. While the trial is short lived (you prove his innocence in a race against the clock), it leads to a touching reconciliation between Marle and her father—they’d been alienated since her mother’s death. Marle crashes through the stain glass window above the court room in an action scene befitting her character; it shows how she goes against the traditional mold, breaking sacred rites to do what is right, consequences be damned.

There are also two sidequests in which Robo plays a key role. The first involves a desert bereft of plantation, which he spends four hundred years reforesting. It’s one of the most graphic representations of your team’s effect on time, visually altering the map and giving life where there was none. His efforts take on an even more tragic light considering that in a few hundred years, his work would be rendered futile by Lavos’s awakening. Robo’s more despondent sidequest involves discovering his true identity in the apocalyptic future. His actual designation is Prometheus, and under his original programming Robo was to live among the humans, study them, and bring back the knowledge to the other robots in order to make the remaining people easier targets. It seems like the ultimate betrayal, a Terminator-esque twist, until we find out the future is much more complex than we’d thought. Lavos is still alive, and his children will eventually need to feed. “This world COULD sustain them…if humans were not around,” Mother Brain states. If humans continue to survive and consume Earth’s resources, Lavos would have no choice but to start sending out Lavos seeds to other planets. As Mother Brain sees it, the destruction of humanity could potentially save other worlds, since it would give Lavos no reason to leave.

Even though we had to take Mother Brain down, I couldn’t help but feel regret and sorrow. To Mother Brain, this made sense and was carried out after logical analysis pushed her in this direction. The machines could coexist with Lavos, even creating their own utopia, but the humans could not. The anthropocentric perspective is the only thing that justifies your annihilating the mechanical force, similar to the way you destroyed the Reptites in the past. Are we the good guys only because we’re human?

One of the most wry commentaries on human nature happens in the moon stone quest. You’re trying to re-energize the rock over several million years so that you can wield its power to create some rare weapons. It’s stolen in 1000AD and you track it down to the mayor of Porre, a miserly scrooge whose own family can’t stand him. He uses his money to make a mockery of those around him and even offers you ten gold to dance like a chicken. If you go back four-hundred years, meet the wife of the then mayor (the greedy one’s ancestor), you can change destiny with a simple gift. She loves jerky and when she finds out you have some, she offers you money in exchange for it. If you generously offer it to her for free, she’s so touched by your kindness, she promises to teach her children to be just as giving. When you jump back to the present, the mayor will hand you back the moon stone without requiring anything in exchange. On top of that, his family loves him for being so gracious and he seems an overall happier man. One act of kindness had huge repercussions throughout the generations.

(As a bit of an aside, the whole scene reminded me of a point I saw highlighted in Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises versus Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. Both films cover the devastation wrought on Japan during World War II. But whereas Miyazaki’s ultimate message is of hope, Takahata’s is one of despair in The Kingdom of Madness and Dreams Miyazaki himself speculates how different each filmmaker’s work would be had they had different past experiences.)

If there’s two complaints I had about the final sequence, it’s that neither Ayla nor Crono get a special sidequest. I would have expected Ayla to have some kind of backstory with Kino. And despite Crono being the silent hero, I would have really enjoyed finding out more about who he is, what his relationship with his family is, and why he likes cats so much.

Cats are the Secret Rulers of Chrono Trigger

There are cats everywhere in Chrono Trigger. If you return to the ruins of Zeal in 12,000BC with Magus in your group, Janus’ cat Alfador will follow you around. And in Magus’ sidequest involving Ozzie and company, a cat will actually help you vanquish them. Cats have apparently won their secret war with dogs, as there are no canines present throughout the entirety of Chrono Trigger. We can even speculate that just as dogs really run the world behind Silent Hill, it’s very well possible cats are pulling the strings and their real goal is to let the humans get wiped out by Lavos so they can take over. Sorry, robots.

Yasunori Mitsuda

I’d be remiss in writing a retrospective/replay without mentioning Yasunori Mitsuda’s brilliant soundtrack. There was a period of time when I had heavy insomnia and the only thing that would consistently put me to sleep was the first CD of the 3 CD OST of Chrono Trigger. I know those tracks both consciously and subconsciously as my sleep patterns were intertwined with their melodies. Mitsuda himself, who often slept at his studio, stated that several of his dreams were inspirations for his music. He specifically did not want his tracks to fit into a genre, instead, drawing on personal themes. There’s a quality to each of them that reminds me of a reverie, a timeless sense which is part of their appeal. This ranges from Frog’s theme, streaming with nobility and loss, to Crono’s brave and bombastic track, to the intangible tragedy and intricacy of Schala’s chorus. Unfortunately, Mitsuda suffered a devastating loss when forty in-progress tracks were lost after his hard drive crashed. The stress might have been one of the factors resulting in his stomach ulcers, and he eventually needed help from Final Fantasy maestro Nobuo Uematsu to finish it up. How different would the game feel if those forty tracks had survived? Would there be any significant changes?

I wonder if there is a corresponding library for musical composers like that in Sandman for books that exist only in dreams.

Choices

One of the most innovative features Chrono Trigger gave players was the New Game+ feature, which let you restart the game with all your powers intact. You didn’t have to worry about level-grinding and could instead focus on changing history to get one of the multiple endings (thirteen when I last checked, but there could be more on the DS remake). Depending on when you defeat Lavos, you’ll get a very different universe as a result. If youbeat the game before you kill the Reptites, for example, you will usher in a new Dino Age where everyone is reptilian.

This type of freedom can be both liberating and upsetting—liberating in that you can go and do whatever you want to get a unique experience; disturbing in the sense that you might not get the complete experience. As more and more games have so many variables with different players getting divergent results, this is less like a film, where interpretation defines the experience, and more like having a unique scenario play out depending on player choice. Chrono Trigger uses this mechanic to its advantage with the New Game+ that encourages multiple playthroughs and further exploration.

But on some of the modern RPGs, they’re so vast, I feel compelled to consult FAQs and strategy guides to make sure I don’t miss anything significant even though I really don’t like using them. Chrono Trigger’s sequel, Chrono Cross, is full of instances where a “wrong” decision will prevent a given character from joining your team for the rest of the game. I can think of several contemporary games where I missed big story points other gamers raved about because of different choices I’d made. In this case, it’s more a reflection of how eager I am to experience all the main storylines of a game rather than a critique in itself of the genre. I can’t blame a given title for being too grand. In fact, I relish in the knowledge that my decisions actually impact the storyline and often live with choices that resulted in heartbreaking consequences (Dragon Age, Heavy Rain, Mass Effect, Witcher II, and Suikoden II come to mind). The potential for multiple narratives intertwining in manifold directions spurred on by the player was almost perfectly executed in Chrono Trigger, remarkable considering it came out over twenty years ago. It’s no wonder it’s considered one of the greatest games of all time.

In many ways, games were my myths growing up, the narrative language that helped me to bond with other players across religion, ideology, and race. Games like Chrono Trigger were my universal translator, the cross-cultural myth I shared with almost anyone who played it. I just wish there was a New Game+ for real life.

Peter Tieryas is the author of United States of Japan (Angry Robot, 2016) and Bald New World (JHP Fiction, 2014). His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Kotaku, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He travels through time at @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/09/24/chrono-trigger-replay-part-3-a-death-in-the-family/feed/17Chrono Trigger Replay Part 2: The Threads of a Forgotten Pasthttps://www.tor.com/2015/09/23/chrono-trigger-replay-part-2-the-threads-of-a-forgotten-past/
https://www.tor.com/2015/09/23/chrono-trigger-replay-part-2-the-threads-of-a-forgotten-past/#commentsWed, 23 Sep 2015 13:00:09 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=188784Welcome back to the replay of Chrono Trigger! Last time we covered the first section of the game, leading up to the battle with Magus. Today we’ll get to the single greatest moment in my 16-bit gaming experience—discovering the Kingdom of Zeal 12,000 years into the past. Coming right after the plunge into a prehistoric 65 Million BC and stopping the Reptites attempt to wipe out humanity, this ice age was a cold awakening. Snow blasting across your face, a destitute, miserable arctic landscape. Then, paradise, a city in the heavens, grander than ‘a castle in the sky.’

The music was arcane, mysterious, and yet full of hope. The technology and artistry complemented each other perfectly, just as magic had driven the culture to new heights. Zeal was where “dreams could come true.” I was both confused and in awe. How did this world connect with the rest of Chrono Trigger? Sages and strange creatures challenged me with ontological questions about existence. Trivial human needs were scoffed at. Objects I’d seen in the future had their roots here. More than any world in gaming, I wished I could travel here.

It’s a rare game that’s able to connect these disparate worlds so seamlessly while maintaining their individual identity. I was surprised to discover that my battle with archvillain for the first half of Chrono Trigger, Magus, had its beginnings all the way back to this strange wonderland.

Magus and the Reptites

The battle with Magus was the most difficult boss battle in the game up to that point with all of his elemental shifts and the literal need to defeat the hundred monsters residing in the castle to get there. The first time through the game, I presumed Magus was the final boss and that vanquishing him would fix the future, since it would stop Magus from creating Lavos. With the aid of the Masamune, multiple X-Strikes, a stream of Lightning 2s (as Magus kept on going to the lightning barrier), I was able to defeat him. I thought the game was over. But that’s when things took an unexpected twist.

“Don’t wake up on me now,” Magus states in frustration and anger to Lavos.

“YOU’RE the one who CREATED him!” your party yells back at Magus.

Magus then reveals that he wasn’t the creator, but rather that he summoned Lavos to try and destroy it. The villain who had killed Glenn’s master and transformed him into a frog while wreaking havoc in Guardia actually had the same goal as the heroes. It made no sense, but was also part of Chrono Trigger’s trend towards bucking RPG tropes. In this case, the villain wasn’t even the villain, and the story was only getting warmed up. Before you can get to the bottom of Magus’s conflict, you’re sucked into a time gate and thrown “forward to the past.”

More specifically, to Laruba Village in 65 Million B.C., which is inhabited by the prehistoric humans. They’ve been attacked by the Reptites in retaliation for Ayla having helped you retrieve the Gate Key earlier. Your party now has to rescue the humans who’ve been taken captive and eliminate the Reptite army once and for all. It’s a grueling slog as you defeat Reptite after Reptite. The final confrontation pits you against Azala, queen of the Reptites, and the Black Tyrano—essentially a tyrannosaurus rex with fireballs.

After you beat her, the sad theme (“At the Bottom of Night)” plays and Azala tragically asks, “Could the heavens truly have sided with the apes? Listen, primates, and let it be known. We Reptites fought bravely to the bitter end. We… have no future.” That’s when it hit me—I’d helped exterminate a race of sentient beings. Even when Ayla offers to save Azala, she accepts her fate and knows that her peoples’ end is near. What could one Reptite queen do against Lavos (the “big fire,” as Ayla translates)? Crono and company have devastated their cold-blooded ranks; they couldn’t rebuild now even if they wanted to.

When the party leaves Azala, it’s basically the end for the Reptites, especially with Lavos crashing into the planet. Since the humans are the dominant species now, they evolve, grow, and expand their knowledge, eventually founding the Kingdom of Zeal, with the Reptites relegated to a historical footnote. The disturbing aspect of all this is that Zeal wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t wiped out humanity’s Reptite rivals and their leader in the first place. Without your interference, it’s possible that the Reptites might have even defeated the humans, especially because only you wielded the lightning magic that they were so vulnerable to. While technically Lavos’ arrival via meteor is what crushed their existence, you certainly expedited their extinction.

This is explored further in one of the alternate endings where the Reptites rule the world, and in the sequel, Chrono Cross: in that game’s parallel timeline, Azala was not defeated and went on to create a whole new civilization called Dinotopia, their version of Zeal. It’s a kingdom that has harnessed the power of nature into a dragon god and created a utopia for reptilian life.

Crono is the chief agent in an extermination that would reshape history. Which begs the question, is advancement only possible in the face of catastrophe? After all, if dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct, could humans have taken their place?

Janus and Zeal

Shortly after playing through Chrono Trigger, I came across Colin Wilson’s book, The Occult. For the most part, I presumed Zeal had been a world made up by the developers. But I was in for a surprise as I learned that it was actually based on folklore and myth (even if some of the sources are considered dubious).

Wilson cites two writers in writing about the ancient Atlantis: “According to Noel Langley, the Atlanteans, who date back as far as 200,000 B.C., were immensely headstrong, commanded powers of extrasensory perception and telepathy, and had electricity and had invented the airplane. Their energy source, the ‘Tuaoi Stone’ or terrible crystal, was eventually so misused by this iron-willed race it brought about the final catastrophe.” And citing another writer, Cayce: “their civilization was highly developed and they possessed some ‘crystal stone’ for trapping and utilising the ray of the sun.”

12,000 BC was an important date in history as the beginning of the end for the glaciation from the last ice age. It seemed like the perfect period for humanity to rise from the ashes, or the cold in this case. But in the world of Chrono Trigger, barely any traces of Zeal remained in the “present” era. Despite all their advanced technology, something had destroyed them. I figured it was Lavos, but the truth was more insidious.

As your party explores more of the celestial Zeal, the citizens’ pride and their limitless zeal for all things magic is unmistakable. The trope of hubris rears its ugly head in the form of a queen bent on harnessing Lavos to earn immortality. But it’d be too pat to solely blame her for their ways. All the citizens of Zeal believe and support her cause, despising the earthbound humans. They believe they are superior beings who deserve to live forever and relish in the powers magic gives them, and it never even occurs to them that Lavos might be manipulating and using them. They are certain they can harness it completely to their advantage. The environmental message is both damning and a warning in light of the eventual destruction of Zeal.

We’re also introduced to a snotty kid, Janus, and his older sister Schala, the children of the queen. Schala wields a great deal of power, even if Janus (named after the deity of gateways) is the superior magician. Eventually, the Queen’s machinations cause the destruction of the entire kingdom, including Schala’s absorption into Lavos (creating the Dream Devourer). But the big twist is that the bratty kid, Janus, is actually a younger Magus, the villain from earlier. When Schala is essentially killed, Janus was hurtled into the future, where he renames himself Magus and becomes the leader of the Mystics. From there, everything he undertook, including taking over Guardia, was driven by his desire to save his sister—though destructive, the emotional undercurrent of his time-distorting actions were actually noble in cause.

On a base level, Magus is emblematic of Zeal, ruthlessly killing Guardia’s soldiers in pursuit of his ambition without regards to the cost and those who have to suffer for it. But going even further, Zeal is like a human Lavos, a parasitic existence whose sole purpose is to exploit. Only by destroying the planet can Lavos thrive. Likewise, Zeal’s pursuit of ultimate power is dependent on the slaves they utilize to build the sea palace. Just as the survival of Ayla’s village necessitates the destruction of the Reptites.

The broader theme is the relationship between civilization, catastrophe, and rebirth, connected through time. Those are stages that embody your relationship with Magus, one of the most complex and interesting villains in gaming. I can’t think of any other games where the villain is also given the option of permanently joining your party. Even after he becomes part of the team, he can’t perform dual attacks with any of your members. He’s a lone wolf, an outlier who never fits in. But he’s still a badass, and years before Alucard floated in his Symphony of the Night dash, Magus led the way.

Writing sophisticated villains is a tough balance to maintain. To some extent, Chrono Cross attempted this by actually making you become your archenemy, Lynx, for a short time. But the narrative threads never reached the level of cohesion and unity achieved in Chrono Trigger.

It’s because at his core, Magus is a brother who loves his sister and wants to save her from death. Warding off mortality, whether an individual or the planet itself, is the common theme that binds the story together. It’s even implied in a later campfire scene that the time gates are ways the planet is reliving past memories after the trauma of its future destruction, like neurons sparking nerves of longing that humans, as extensions of the planet, experience. The planet is reminiscing.

Banpos and Lavos

One aspect I’ve always wondered about is Lavos’ actual origins. Where did it come from? Are there other Lavos beings? If one can wreak so much destruction, what would happen if more came?

At the same time, it’s implied that humanity’s advancement only happened as a direct result of the rise of Lavos—without it, the Reptites would have dominated. So its arrival portended both humanity’s progression and eventual destruction.

I’m surprised that the flippant comments the people of Zeal make in light of impending doom remind me so much of contemporary life, specifically in the face of climate change. There are those in our own world who take it seriously—like Melchior and the other sages in Zeal—who are putting up all the warning signals. But they’re either ignored or regarded with a great deal of skepticism by much of the populace. Even if a Zeal-like fate awaits us, is there anything that can prevent the catastrophe? As Chrono Trigger shows us, even time travelers are met with suspicion. Even if someone came from the future, would we pay heed?

A few years ago, I visited a site in Xi’an, China, an archaeological site that contains several Neolithic settlements from over 6,000 years ago. They had a language, culture, art, customs, rituals, beliefs, all of which have been lost. I saw their remains, wondered at their secrets, their histories. At best, the researchers can only guess, theorize, and imagine.

I am haunted by the threads of this forgotten past, the futuristic metropolis of Zeal, a young Magus, and Crono’s role in wiping away the Reptites. Decades and hundreds of games later, coming across Zeal is still one of the greatest moments in my gaming experience. I wish I lived there, until I realize, in some ways, I do. We live in what would comparatively be considered a utopia, with lots of great food, entertainment, advanced medicine—things that would seem like magic to people of the past. I sincerely hope in our zeal for progress, we don’t become the Lavos of our own world.

Update like whoa: *A few reddit users have pointed out that in the Nintendo DS remake, there’s an alternate dimension called the Lost Sanctum in which a village of Reptites survived. There’s also a slight difference in translation during Azala’s death that softens the implications of her death, even though I still think it was your party’s actions that ultimately led to their defeat (Lavos was just the final stroke). The developers are still tweaking the game and it’s pretty interesting to see it evolve. Hopefully, the effort going into these small shifts will be channeled into a Chrono Trigger 3.

Peter Tieryas is the author of United States of Japan (Angry Robot, 2016) and Bald New World (JHP Fiction, 2014). His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Kotaku, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He travels through time at @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/09/23/chrono-trigger-replay-part-2-the-threads-of-a-forgotten-past/feed/17Chrono Trigger Replay Part 1: Subverting Tropes and Rewriting Your Futurehttps://www.tor.com/2015/09/22/chrono-trigger-replay-part-1/
https://www.tor.com/2015/09/22/chrono-trigger-replay-part-1/#commentsTue, 22 Sep 2015 14:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=185609Chrono Trigger is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, JRPG of all time, and for good reason. It’s a unique mix of Dragon Quest’s quirky but epic narrative, Final Fantasy’s character driven journeys, Dragon Ball’s visual aesthetics, Ninja Gaiden’s cinematic flair, and some of the best retro music ever composed. So it’s […]]]>

Chrono Trigger is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, JRPG of all time, and for good reason. It’s a unique mix of Dragon Quest’s quirky but epic narrative, Final Fantasy’s character driven journeys, Dragon Ball’s visual aesthetics, Ninja Gaiden’s cinematic flair, and some of the best retro music ever composed.

So it’s surprising that when you break down the plot structure and examine the individual story elements, it’s actually rife with fantasy tropes. The princess disguising herself as a commoner to mingle with the people; the heroic quest undertaken without any consideration of the larger context; and an apocalyptic end of the world scenario these young heroes have to overturn. I realize a trope is different from being trite or cliche. At the same time, the combination of these seemingly overused elements is, strangely enough, part of Chrono Trigger’s brilliance, its almost intangible cohesion that has never been emulated, not even in its underappreciated sequel, Chrono Cross.

Because the narrative pieces are so familiar, it allowed the developers to plays with expectations, twisting them right at the moment when players thought they knew what was coming. Marle is the perfect example as the adventurous princess who gets thrown back in time. In most RPGs, the quest is driven by the goal of saving a princess/queen/damsel in distress. But in Chrono Trigger, after following Marle back to Guardia in 600 AD (would that be CE now?), Crono finds she is safely ensconced in Guardia Castle, amused that the people of that time are mistaking her for the missing queen. It seems like an anticlimactic resolution until she explodes into thin air. Her appearance in the past actually caused the demise of that time’s queen, who happens to be Marle’s ancestor, since they called off the rescue party meant to save her after she was kidnapped. Animated in charming Akira Toriyama fashion, it illustrated how the past affected the future, which is your present but your future and your past at the same time.

Context is important here; playing as a kid, the time paradox was riveting, heightening the stakes in a way that piqued me. The way it illustrated the threads of causality was impactful in the way it not only got me to reconceive time, but fantasy storytelling as well. It was also the most unique iteration of the “save the princess” trope I had experienced, complete with quantum mechanics and time travel. On top of that, it’s not like she goes off and lives happily ever after in some fantasy land once you do rescue her. Instead she joins your group and becomes an integral party member, blowing away foes with her trusty crossbow.

It’s this experimenting with tropes I want to cover in the first part of this Chrono Trigger replay that goes from the beginning of the game all the way up until your preparation for battle with Magus. I’ll be focusing specifically on the future, your trial, and boy heroes.

2300AD

2300AD is a dystopian ruin set in a roboticized society. The contrast with the medieval past is starkly bleak, and the plight of the humans is destitute with no conceivable hope. The environments have changed from the vibrant hues of Guardia Kingdom to the grim undertones marking the aftermath of a horrific Armageddon. Humans are kept alive through enertrons, even though they’re starving because they have no food (are the enertrons chemical and hormonal injections, similar to the processed junk that we eat today, only in energy form?). I’d seen and read about apocalyptic landscapes before in films and books, but it was always with the awareness that I was reading a novel in that setting or watching a film with imminent doom as its backdrop. The future of 2300AD was an unexpected shock on both a visual and emotional level, even though in itself, the idea of a destroyed planet isn’t original per se. Rather, it’s the time jump, contrasting the past and future, that makes this age so disturbing. When Lucca uncovers the fact that it was a strange monster called Lavos that annihilated the world, I felt an immense sense of loss. That’s why I didn’t question Crono and company’s determination to change the past and set things right. When Lucca says, “Let’s go,” you can either reply, “Okay!” or “No…”—I emphatically declared “Okay!” and even though it’s only the illusion of choice, I loved the group’s sense of nobility, their unquestioning leap into doing what is right without any regards to the consequences or even the feasibility of their task.

I know ambivalence and moral choices are part of the modern day RPG, the conflicted hero who often can choose not to do what is right. But there is something refreshingly honorable in Crono’s stalwart goodness. That goes hand in hand with Yasunori Mitsuda’s empowering score that always ‘triggers’ at the right time (in this instance, Crono’s theme).

Each of the characters represents an ideal that is straightforward to pinpoint down to even their elemental affiliation for magic. As much as I like modern JRPGs, most of the characters fall flat and blend into one another. They too represent tropes, but not memorable ones, definitely leaning towards the cliche rather than embodiments of traits I admire. That’s been my biggest problem with current Final Fantasy games; I can’t name a single character I really liked in the last few, other than maybe Auron in FFX. In contrast, I appreciated and understood what each of the Chrono Trigger characters represented, from the fierce and protective Ayla with her prehistoric sensibilities, to the spunky inventor friend, Lucca, who accidentally uncovers time travel, to the conflicted Robo who is torn between his desire to help humanity and to better understand his programming.

Sacrifice is a key aspect of all their journeys, and each of them has to give up something dear to them in order to undertake their role in the monomyth. In Robo’s case, it’s companionship with the rest of the R-series who brutally attack him and chuck his remains in the garbage when he tries to defend his human friends. I choked up as a kid when that scene first happened, outraged, hoping he could be salvaged. Even in this replay, I found myself moved by Robo’s decision. Sentimental? Yes. Maybe even a little melodramatic. But perfectly executed so that when Lucca eventually fixes him again, I was thrilled. It also helps that he kicks robot ass with his power fists.

The Trial

Chrono Trigger as a project was conceived on a road trip to America. While researching computer graphics, the videogame trinity of Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest), and Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball) decided to try something bold, something no one had ever done before. They brought in Masato Kato (who had worked on the amazing cutscenes for Ninja Gaiden on the original NES) as scenario writer to work with Horii on the story. Horii has a rich narrative background, inspiring the whole visual novel genre with his ingenious and unexpectedly deep Portopia Serial Murder Case developed in 1983 (which inspired developers like Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear fame). All his stories are rife with eccentric twists, a dark sense of humor, and unexpected moments of humanity that shine through. For western audiences, playing and appreciating Chrono Trigger for the first time, this was as close to understanding the fervor for the Dragon Quest games Japanese gamers had, and still have.

As much as I loved the heroism, the different eras, and the characters, oddly enough the part that struck me most were three seemingly unimportant decisions I made early in the game at the Millennial Fair. The first is to eat a stranger’s lunch to heal yourself, a common enough occurrence in most JRPGs; the second is after you first bump into Marle, you can either help her up, or retrieve her pendant for her and then assist her to her feet; and the third is to aid a little girl in finding her cat. Pretty standard fare in RPGs without any apparent consequences. Or so I thought.

After you rescue Marle and return to 1000AD, you’re put on trial for allegedly kidnapping the princess, thanks to a judicial system you helped inspire back in 600AD. It’s a dramatic scene, a gorgeous scrolling background, stained glass window with the weights of justice on it, officials whispering to each other, crowds watching with anticipation. I wondered what the trial would be about, and when they asked questions about my moral character, I thought I would be exonerated, no problem. That’s when they did a flashback to the sandwich I’d eaten earlier in the game, or in their eyes, “stolen” from an old man. Then the fact that, to save a few seconds, I picked up the pendant before helping Marle up, indicating that I had an ulterior motive for befriending her in the first place. In my defense, my attorney pointed out how I helped the little girl find her missing cat.

Even Kafka’s Trial couldn’t make me feel more paranoid about my past decisions. I didn’t even remember eating the guy’s sandwich, and yet somehow, the 16-bit game had kept tabs on my decisions. What else was it aware of? I’d never seen anything like this in a game before where I was held accountable for past decisions. The combination of Horii’s story telling, Toriyama’s art, Sakaguchi’s sense of scale, Masato’s cinematic angles, and Mitsuda’s score was compelling.

Going forward, I paid attention to every decision I made, no matter how trivial. I was even worried about taking treasure chests from the prison, concerned it might have an impact on the story down the line. My wife, who went through this new playthrough with me, also asked similar questions after the trial, wondering if any future actions might affect a sequence further in the game. What’s worse was we felt guilty, even though we knew were innocent. We shouldn’t have eaten that guy’s sandwich!

The Hero

I don’t like the idea of kid heroes, especially “chosen” ones who will “save the world.” There is nothing really special about them, only that they were randomly selected, preordained by the fates. Not only is it silly, but it takes away from the whole idea of choice and determination. If there’s one thing Chrono Trigger makes clear, it’s that our decisions, even trivial ones, have an impact. We can change almost anything, even defy death. So I groaned out loud when I found out that a so-called “Hero” showed up to save Guardia in 600AD from the villain Magus and was an annoying brat named Tata who fits into the stereotype of the boy hero down to his design. Everyone is in awe of him, including his parents, who can’t stop boasting about him.

I was relieved when, shortly afterwards, we meet Tata and discover he is a fraud. He merely found the Hero’s Badge, and as he had aspired to be a knight, he faked his heroic identity. Another trope teased, then overturned, which also makes Tata a more sympathetic and interesting character.

The true hero, it turns out, isn’t the great knight Cyrus, who has gone missing, but instead, a frog. The Frog. But even that seems a whimsical claim because Frog—later revealed to be Glenn, squire to Cyrus—was a failure who was helpless to watch his best friend and mentor die at the hands of Magus. He is stuck in a depressed rut, wallowing in self-pity, and only joins you after you fix the Masamune (which includes a bit of a detour to 65,000,000 BC).

I loved Frog as a hero because he went against expectations. An amphibious knight who’s in hiding barely seems like the savior capable of stopping the all powerful Magus. But just as much as the metamorphosis is visual, he’s mentally wracked by guilt and remorse. That doesn’t stop him from being a powerful ally as his X Strike with Crono is one of the most sublime attacks in any game. Frog epitomizes nobility to a fault. He also provides interesting juxtaposition against characters like the more free spirited Lucca, who shares one of the heartier exchanges during Frog’s first exit, as well as his animosity and hatred for Magus. The conflict with the blue-haired magician takes focus as defeating him becomes one of the major prerequisites for vanquishing Lavos—or so the party believes. I hated Magus for Frog’s sake and couldn’t wait to destroy him. Little did I know, I had just fallen for another trope that was going to be turned on its head.

When I first pitched the idea of a replay/retrospective, it was in large part inspired by how much I was enjoying the rewatches and reread articles on Tor.com. But as I delved into Chrono Trigger, I realized there was so much I loved and wanted to cover, I didn’t even know where to start. Fortunately, the editors challenged me with the idea of exploring some interesting themes, including familiar tropes in the first section, that had me playing the game from a very different perspective.

If there’s one thing that has continually impressed me through the replay, it’s that I discover something completely new each time I go through it. The game is a harmonious series of triggers, fusing the art, writing, music, and gameplay that works seamlessly and makes the whole experience feel like the pinnacle of all things RPG, gaming, and storytelling. I’m convinced the creators had a time travel machine that let them iterate on Chrono Trigger until they arrived at perfection.

Peter Tieryas is the author of United States of Japan (Angry Robot, 2016) and Bald New World. He tweets at @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/09/22/chrono-trigger-replay-part-1/feed/23Is Super Mario Brothers Fantasy or Science Fiction?https://www.tor.com/2015/06/12/is-super-mario-brothers-fantasy-or-science-fiction/
https://www.tor.com/2015/06/12/is-super-mario-brothers-fantasy-or-science-fiction/#commentsFri, 12 Jun 2015 15:00:26 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=178477At first glance, it seems pretty straightforward that the Super Mario Brothers games are a fantasy series. They take place in a fantastic world with dragons, princesses, and magic mushrooms. The RPGs in the series have all the typical role-playing elements of a fantasy game. But when you look at the entire franchise, particularly the […]]]>

At first glance, it seems pretty straightforward that the Super Mario Brothers games are a fantasy series. They take place in a fantastic world with dragons, princesses, and magic mushrooms. The RPGs in the series have all the typical role-playing elements of a fantasy game. But when you look at the entire franchise, particularly the Super Mario Galaxy games, it seems almost certain that the game is science fiction, or at the least, science fantasy. Here are five reasons revolving around specific titles in the series that prove the Super Mario Brothers are works of science fiction.

The Many Worlds of Super Mario Galaxy

Up until the arrival of Nintendo, many game designers had programming backgrounds. The creator of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto, was unique in having an art background and imbued his games with his artistic sensibility. The original Super Mario Bros. was a visual breakthrough after the pixel blips of the Atari, creating appealing characters, scrolling worlds, and blue skies (most backgrounds were black from fear of causing headaches and eyestrain for gamers). Miyamoto revolutionized the gaming canvas with a simple shift in the palette and more importantly, focused on the aesthetics as much as the gameplay. His attention to character designs like the goombas, Mario himself, and Bowser is a huge part of what has made them so iconic all these decades later. In a world inspired by Alice in Wonderland and filled with enormous mushrooms and fiery castles, he seamlessly integrated the art into the level design.

The Super Mario Galaxy games that came a few decades later for the Wii weren’t just an evolution of that first foray into gaming art. They are probably the most innovative games ever developed. There are other titles that outdo it in terms of visuals, physical scope, and narrative, but none in its creative blending of game mechanics and gorgeous artistry. Galaxy subverted gravity to literally flip gaming on its head. Planetoids, brand new suits (traverse clouds, use drills to power your way through the center of a planet, and sting like a bee), along with labyrinthine levels, help make the universe your sandbox. Mario is the Kirk of the Nintendo Universe, rushing headfirst into adventure. But unlike the crew of the Enterprise, Mario embraces the strange physics of these vibrant worlds, leaping from world to world, interacting with them and changing their very fabric. It’s an amazing sensation navigating a lava world which you then freeze so you can skate across a barren ice lake to reach a new launch star—just one of many acts of terraforming.

It’s during one of these excursions that you come across the Starshine Beach Galaxy. It immediately struck me how much it resembled Isle Delfino, the central location of Super Mario Sunshine (Mario’s outing on the Game Cube), and home to the Piantas, the oddly happy race with palm trees growing out of their heads. Yoshi is there, the tropical climate is back, and all that was missing was my Fludd rocket pack.

On another trip, I visited the Supermassive Galaxy, a world where all the enemies came supersized. Whether it was different laws of gravity, or the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the Goombas, Koopa Troopas, and their surrounding building blocks resembled the gigantic forces in Giant Land from Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Tiny-Huge Island of Super Mario 64 (depending on which approach you took).

That’s when I began to wonder: were the unique worlds of the Super Mario series different galaxies Mario had ventured to? What if all the fantasy worlds of Super Mario were various adventures in the separate galaxies, and the Mushroom Kingdom was just one of many worlds? That is pretty much what is shown in the first Super Mario Galaxy when Princess Peach’s Castle is taken from its foundations by Bowser and lifted up into space above the planet.

The Dimensional Shifting of Super Paper Mario Wii

The first time I read about and actually understood the science of dimensions and their connection with our own world was in Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace. He postulated the idea of how 2D beings would be flabbergasted by the possibility of 3D existence, unable to comprehend going from a flat plane to the geometric explosion of spatial propulsion. In Super Paper Mario, dimensional shifting becomes the key game mechanic, bridging the NES and SNES classics with their 3D counterparts. Count Bleck is trying to open a singularity called “The Void” in hopes of wiping out the universe. But Mario, with the use of a dimensional shifter, uses quantum mechanics to show that even a paper cut can be deadly in the right hands.

It was probably the best illustration of dimensional limitations I’d experienced, incorporating clever puzzles in every nook and alleyway. See a hole you can’t traverse? Flip into 3D and go around it. An impregnable wall? Change your perspective and suddenly, the way is clear. If superstrings were titillations in higher dimensions, I wondered how my mad waves of the Wii controller and their ululations in my finger muscles were transmuting two dimensions down. Butterflies aren’t the only ones who can cause storms on the other side of the planet.

Mario’s first shifts into 3D involved ripping apart the threads of his flat existence. It caused him pain and damage, sustainable only in short sprints. By the time Mario 64 swings around, he’s become adjusted to the three dimensions, and by the time of Galaxy, he’s prancing across space, flying free.

The Super Mario Bros 2 That Wasn’t Really Super Mario Bros. 2

I’ve talked a lot about physics, and it’s because the original Mario games set the standard by which gaming physics are judged. The original NES platformers had smooth controls that were intuitive and made jumping and running feel right. Try loading up any of the other Nintendo games of the time, and you’ll notice many of them have jumps that feel clunky and frustrating, resulting in a lot of cheap death and busted controllers. Super Mario Bros. 3 was probably the pinnacle of the Mario 2D platformers, slightly edging Super Mario World. A huge part of that was the variety of suits that introduced all new mechanics, as well as the steampunk background; huge airships, themed worlds, and Bowser statues that fired laser beams.

Among all the Mario games, one stands out for being vastly different. Super Mario Brothers 2 started out as Doki Doki Panic before morphing into a strange sequel for the original Super Mario Brothers. In the biggest change to the gameplay, the brothers were accompanied by Princess Toadstool and Toad. Their task was to rescue Dreamland from Wart who has been creating a legion of monsters via his dream machine. I always used either Luigi or the Princess, the former because of his long, wiggling jump, and the latter because she could hover. Stomping on enemies no longer crushed them. Instead, you picked them up and hurtled them at each other. The world felt much more whimsical with surreal elements like eagle faced gates, moby dicks spouting water, magic carpets, and cherries leading to invincibility stars. It was a Kafkaesque romp with bizarre enemies and masked fiends. It’s also probably the best argument that the franchise is essentially fantasy.

But the ending renders it moot because after defeating Wart, we find out it was all a part of Mario’s dream. Talk about lucid dreaming.

Time Travel and Other Mad Science

What would it be like to travel through your subconscious meanderings? Jump back in time to see the early stages of the Mushroom Kingdom and fight off an alien invasion with your younger self? Or become microsized and enter Bowser’s body in an uncomfortably intestinal collaboration? The Mario & Luigi series took all that was strange about the Mario series and made it stranger, infusing elements of science fiction and pop culture to give gamers quirks that only magic mushrooms could inspire.

Or a mad professor. Professor Elvin Gadd—an Albert Einstein/Thomas Edison hybrid—invents a time machine in Partners in Time, the Fludd used in Sunshine, as well as the Poltergust 3000 that allows Luigi to vacuum up ghosts in Luigi’s Mansion. Gadd shares the same voice actor for Yoshi, Kazumi Totaka, and both augment the super powers the brothers wield. Likewise, both have their own obscure language that is incomprehensible gibberish unless you’re a baby—so it’s a good thing baby Mario and Luigi are around to help out their future selves battle the alien horde of the Shroob in Partners in Time. It turns out baby tears are the kryptonite to the Shroob, so the Professors Gadd channel baby tears (manufactured, of course) into a hydrogush blaster to save the world and send everyone back to their proper place in the timeline.

All along, I’ve assumed that unlike Link in the Zelda games, Mario is the same Mario throughout the series. Is that even the case? Or does each Mario game represent an alternate history, a new iteration of the mythical plumber? What were plumbers like thousands of years ago? The word plumber has its origins in the Roman word for lead, plumbum. Anyone who worked with piping and baths (many of which were made of lead) were called Plumbarius. Mario and Luigi don’t just represent the common Joe—they embody the highly malleable and adaptable materials that have been the cornerstone of civilization.

That Time the Dinosaurs Didn’t All Go Extinct

On the inverse, the daily life of a goomba isn’t easy. They spend their whole lives training in the ranks of Bowser’s dystopia in order to become fodder for Mario and his goons, crushed to death (if you haven’t, I highly recommend this short film about life from the perspective of a Goomba). The other minions in Koopa’s army don’t fare much better. If only Bowser would give up his master plan to kidnap Princess Peach, what kind of empire could they build?

The most maligned entry into the entire Mario franchise has to be the Super Mario Brothers movie, a film that explored an alternate history where the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct and evolved into a race led by a Dennis Hopper rendered Bowser. I was surprised when I recently rewatched the movie and enjoyed it. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the reviews had stated, and as Chris Lough wrote in his retrospective for Tor, “There’s only one real problem with the Super Mario Bros. movie: its name.” Even Miyamoto commented: “[In] the end, it was a very fun project that they put a lot of effort into… The one thing that I still have some regrets about is that the movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. video games were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a video game, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself.” (italics mine)

I was stunned that Miyamoto’s main problem with the film was that it remained too faithful to the game, rather than veering off in a completely different direction. Some of its creative ways of incorporating elements from the game proved too disturbing for reviewers, including a younger me who found the small-headed lizard faced goombas as well as the realistically raptor-like Yoshi scary when I first saw it. An older me appreciated all that they tried to do, including centering the romance around Luigi and Daisy, the oppressive fascist society propagated by Bowser, and the only aspect that maintained its visual appeal during its migration to the big screen: the bob-ombs. Dino-Manhattan is a dark and terrifying reflection of our own world if it had squandered all its resources. The set designs had that 80s/90s type of appeal that was grungy, futuresque, and real. No backgrounds constructed fully in CG that make everything look fake and too color-corrected. If the Mario Brothers film was an original work of science fiction, it would probably have had a much better reception than it did. But even as a Mario film, I liked Bob Hoskins’ grouchy take on the iconic hero in conjunction with the more optimistic and naive Luigi.

For me, the biggest issue with the Super Mario film is that it went too far into science fiction side of things without bringing along any of the fantasy elements. Super Mario Galaxy towed the line perfectly, and resulted in one of the greatest games ever developed. Other iterations in the series have also walked that tightrope, most to critical acclaim. In the latest iteration of Mario, Super Mario World 3D, they actually went back to straight fantasy (emphasizing the multiplayer), and while the reviews have been mostly positive, it’s been considered a step back, a retread that doesn’t add anything new.

I know Super Mario Brothers probably falls into the science fantasy or space adventure category more than science fiction because even though it meets most of wiki’s definition for SF, it fails in the plausibility category. No one is going to believe the games could ever be real. That’s part of what makes the film so important to my argument because it bridges the gap, staying faithful to the spirit of the games, at least according to Miyamoto, while somewhat maintaining plausibility. I can imagine an alternate universe where dinosaurs evolved and moved on, though they’d more likely be similar to Star Trek: Voyager’s Voth than Bowser.

Independent of which genre the series falls squarely into, my personal preference for the Mario games are the ones that incorporate elements of science fiction.

That is, other than the American Super Mario Brothers 2, which has always had a special place in my heart because it was so different and magical. I’ve always wondered why Nintendo never made a direct sequel in a similar art style with 2D mechanics (although Super Mario World 3D I mentioned above does allow you to play as any of the four characters). It could be a merging of alternate histories where the Mario films took off and resulted in a bunch of sequels that Mario and crew live through, only to wake up and find out it was all a nightmare. The final boss would be the film Mario vs. the video game Mario. Who would win? It wouldn’t matter as Bowser or another enemy would show up and kidnap someone who would need to be rescued, at which point they’d team up or compete against one another and— hopefully, the cycle never ends and the games keep on evolving as Mario and company take on new mythic battles, one stomp at a time.

Peter Tieryas is a character artist who has worked on films like Guardians of the Galaxy, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, and Alice in Wonderland. His novel, Bald New World, was listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books as well as Publisher Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of Summer 2014. His writing has been published in places like Kotaku, Kyoto Journal, Tor.com, Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, and ZYZZYVA, and he tweets @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/06/12/is-super-mario-brothers-fantasy-or-science-fiction/feed/3From Quantum Tunneling Devices to BioMimetics: The 10 Strangest Transports in Non-Driving Gameshttps://www.tor.com/2015/04/15/from-quantum-tunneling-devices-to-biomimetics-the-10-strangest-transports-in-non-driving-games/
https://www.tor.com/2015/04/15/from-quantum-tunneling-devices-to-biomimetics-the-10-strangest-transports-in-non-driving-games/#commentsWed, 15 Apr 2015 14:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com?p=171085&preview_id=171085Some say gaming transports us to other worlds. With outsourcing and digital forms of communication becoming so advanced, will there come a day when we won’t even need to leave our homes? Work from your house, communicate with friends via Google Hangouts, buy groceries online, then stream all your games and movies. One of the […]]]>

Some say gaming transports us to other worlds. With outsourcing and digital forms of communication becoming so advanced, will there come a day when we won’t even need to leave our homes? Work from your house, communicate with friends via Google Hangouts, buy groceries online, then stream all your games and movies. One of the greatest legacies the Romans left behind was their amazing network of roads connecting the Empire together. Will future nations showcase their advancement by their complete lack of roads?

In anticipation of this car-less future, we’ve put together a list of the strangest modes of transportation for protagonists in non-driving games… starting with a shoe.

Putting the Best Shoe Forward in Super Mario Bros. 3

The oldest known shoes were found in the Fort Rock Cave in Oregon, dating to 7,000 or 8,000 BCE. The oldest leather shoes were made from cowhide and discovered in Armenia, dating back to around 3,500 BCE. Historically, the biological trend for smaller toe bone width has decreased over tens of thousands of years of human existence, indicating increased footwear by humans. Mario must have some of the toughest feet around, stomping innumerable Buzzy Beetles, Koopa Troopas, and Goombas each time the princess gets kidnapped.

The Kuribo’s Shoe is, in some ways, a form of Mario-envy, being prototyped specifically by the Goombas on level 5-3 to counter their greatest foe while recreating his abilities. Inevitably, Mario takes the shoe over and becomes practically impervious to geographic and physical danger, wreaking terror on his journey through the Mushroom Kingdom. The Koopa Army, realizing its complete failure, never employs it in battle again, much to the chagrin of the Goombas. Who knew Goombas dreamed of electric shoes?

Bionic Commando and Romantic Getaways

There’s nothing like traveling with a loved one, especially as they help pass time along the long stretches of road through endless plains, fields, and farms that smell of fertilizer. The last Bionic Commando took that to another level. Contemporary biomimetics (or biomimicry) uses actual examples from nature to mimic engineering feats, and inspirations include the wings of butterflies for RFID tags and nano sensors to detect explosives, a coolant system based on termite mounds, resin which was created by studying the material found in arthropods and Agent Nathan Spencer’s wife, whose body became part of his bionic arm to ensure a perfect sync. While a bionic arm with a grappling gun is an effective way for a spy to stealthily infiltrate enemy territory—especially as it allows quick travel between high rises and military installations—we imagine it also makes for some weird date nights.

The Portal to My Heart

Stephen Hawking has famously challenged the traditional view of black holes he’d originally proposed, replacing the notion of event horizons with apparent horizons. Precepts of science always crumble in the way of progress, aligning with Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shifts. Theories that have fallen the way of the Dreamcast include the Phlogiston theory, Aristotelian physics, the Ptolemaic system, the Flat Earth theory, and the Miasma Theory of Disease. Our own theories on what constituted the universe collapsed when were introduced to quantum mechanics. We felt metaphorical portals opening in our consciousness as theoreticians posited more dimensions than we knew what to do with, including ones that spanned time and space.

The universe is stranger than we could ever have imagined. Fortunately, we had an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device and Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System to assist us through our confusion. We’ve actually used a mini-wormhole to cause a temporal displacement so we can go back in time to rewrite this article fifteen times in fifteen different ways. This is actually the fifteenth time you are reading this article. Each time, we have changed the entire tone of the piece to study and test your emotional reaction. “Please note that we have added a consequence for failure that will result in an ‘unsatisfactory’ mark on your official testing record, followed by death. Good luck!”

Gliding on a Mechanical “Cloud” in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

There have been countless re-imaginings of the classic Chinese tale, Journey to the West. One such retelling of the journey to Enlightenment is Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. For the physical journey in the original, Monkey’s ride was a cloud. Not “cloud” in the sense of a digital space storing infinite pieces of a gazillion forgotten memories, but instead, literal cumulonimbi. In Enslaved, Monkey’s journey through the post-apocalyptic wasteland that was once NYC is a mechanical hover board. The addition of this Back to the Future-type technology in Enslaved gave the classic fantasy ride a sci-fi overhaul.

Whale of a Time in Final Fantasy IV

It’s nearly impossible for a person to survive inside a whale (despite the stories of Pinocchio and Jonah suggesting otherwise). Gastric juices would damage their flesh and they’d eventually die from asphyxiation, starvation, or dehydration…unless the whale happened to be a spaceship ascending from the middle of the ocean, designed for travel to the moon. Final Fantasy IV’s new ATB battle system was partly inspired by seeing Formula One Racing with different vehicles speeding at different velocities to add tension and exhilaration to the matches. The Lunar Whale was the inspiration for airships throughout the FFIV world, which led to an odd cycle in which those very airships began causing terror on innocents in order to collect crystals that would awaken the Giant of Babil, a Lunarian project opposed by the creator of the slumbering Lunar Whale (without which the airships would not have been built). Did I also mention there’s a fat chocobo aboard the ship who eats everything?

Chocobos: Not Just For Racing

An ostrich can disembowel and kill a person in only two to three blows, a fact that didn’t intimidate people who straddled them up and rode them in competitive sports. Ostrich racing took on a whole new level in the Final Fantasy series with the familiar ostrich-chicken hybrid called the chocobo. They’re great as war steeds and one of the fastest rides around the world, able to across mountains and oceans on foot. They also helped make the Final Fantasy Tactics opening cutscene one of the most epic in the series. We don’t know if humans will ever be able to walk on water, but Final Fantasy VII showed us you didn’t need a miracle to make it happen. Just a gold chocobo.

Channel Surfing in Persona 4

We’ve watched television at midnight, hoping to be transported into a TV Land made from the subconscious nightmares of its watchers with a plush human sized Teddy as guide. So far, of the eighteen nights we’ve done this, nothing has happened and all we’ve been stuck with are infomercials pitching diet pills and Tanaka selling us wasabi jelly and Inaba trouts. Our cathode rays are firing away, their content dictated by random numbers. At least a persona can be defeated by hand to hand combat. Bad ratings portend imminent doom. The only way to thwart them is to maximize the number of social links, 1,142,000 household links per Nielsen point to be exact. A whole lot of corpses are buried in the mausoleum of canceled television shows and videogames due to lack of social links. We’d love a tour of all of them.

Riding with the Four Horses of the Apocalypse in Red Dead Redemption

It’s strange to think that a majority of the ideas relating to the Apocalypse began with one guy’s bad dream. After being banished to the island of Patmos, St. John wrote in Revelations about the end times and the Four Horsemen; Pestilence (or Conquest), War, Famine, and Death. We bet John never imagined that two-thousand years later, the Horsemen would show up in videogames, including Red Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare DLC. Summoned by blood pacts, the Four Horses, bereft of their riders, are endowed with unlimited stamina and a high health bar to fight off legions of zombies. (Wait—what’s that, GLADOS? Revelations was actually meant as a videogame design document?!)

Sailing the Seas in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker

Metamorphosis is a key part of the hero’s journey, whether transforming into an insect (Kafka’s Metamorphosis), a donkey (The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, known more commonly as The Golden Ass), a whole lot of animals in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, or a talking dragon boat called the King of Red Lions who also happens to be the King of Hyrule.

Link has had a variety of unusual methods of transportation throughout the series, from a whirlwind summoned by his recorder, to the Flute Boy’s Bird, to the Master Sword in the Pedestal of Time. But the King of Red Lions was the strangest. To put things in a modern context, it’d be like if we told someone our car had an actual face that talked to us and that he was none other than the spiritual embodiment of Abraham Lincoln prompting us to save the world.

Pi’illo Talk with Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

In Mario and Luigi: Dream Team, Mario is whisked away on a strange journey where he invades his brother’s dreams. Perhaps less strange was Luigi’s self-portrayal in his dream world—strong, brave, while possessing multiple clones with various movesets—Dreamy Luigi was every bit the hero that Luigi wishes to be. Often seen as the less clever, bumbling, clumsy brother, Luigi dreamed himself to be a superhero and in line with last year’s The Year of Luigi, it seems fitting.

The brothers visit Pi’illo Island and discover that the ancient race of Pi’illo have been imprisoned and turned into stone pillows. With the help of Prince Dreambert, leader of the Pi’illos, who transforms himself into a comfortable-looking red pillow, Luigi is able to go straight to sleep once his head hits the Pi’illo prince. From there, Mario is able to enter Luigi’s dreams for fun, fighting against both Bowser and the ancient nemesis of the Pi’illo, Antasma. The Princely Pi’illo certainly makes for a comfy-but-curious transportation device, physically transporting Mario into the land of dreams.

As a bonus to the list, we wanted to list two examples from Racing Games, starting with Yoshi on Yoshi.

Yoshi is My Other Ride in Mario Kart 8

There are lots of strange rides in the Mario universe—caterpillar-like creatures called Wigglers that have buttons for wheels and a sunflower for flight, bear buggies, bug buggies, and a psychedelic noble charioteer named Prancer. But the strangest ride of all is also Mario’s most trusted companion. Yoshi has made his own way in the Mario universe andin Mario Kart, Yoshi can take to the circuit riding a vehicular version of himself (perhaps a meta-commentary on the ridden finally becoming rider?) The only thing odder would have been Yoshi riding Mario.

The Bombads of Star Wars: Super Bombad Racing

More than a decade ago, I (Peter) was a game tester for LucasArts and one of the last games I tested was called Star Wars: Super Bombad Racing, an attempt to recreate kart racing games with Star Wars characters. Back then, it was a big challenge actually getting to work because I didn’t have a car. Fortunately, a generous co-worker let me carpool with him and on days he’d be out, I’d take the BART to the San Rafael bus station that would ultimately take me to the old LucasArts building, an hour-long trip, or so. Some days, I would work late, and having no ride, I’d end up crashing on the sofas. I often used to sleep with a Chewbacca cut-out standing above me that scared me when I’d wake up, disoriented by sonorous vent booms in the middle of the night.

It was fascinating seeing Bombad Racing come together, a big-headed Darth Maul and Jar-Jar Binks with a kiddish Anakin Skywalker all racing each other. Bombad Racing had a great team and it also marked my eventual transition into the art department, as well as writing game manuals. All these years later, firing up the game on the PS2, I can’t say I enjoyed it, but it was uncanny how it evoked so many vivid memories; it also made me remember some of my concerns from that time, like if I’d be able to eventually get my own car. I did eventually get my own vehicle, a large Kuribo shoe with wheels and a spirit-infused television to pass the time. It played the Midnight Channel 24 hours straight, analyzing the American psyche one videogame at a time.

Peter Tieryas is a character artist who has worked on films like Guardians of the Galaxy, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, and Alice in Wonderland. His novel, Bald New World, was listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books as well as Publisher Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of Summer 2014. His writing has been published in places like Kotaku, Kyoto Journal, Tor.com, Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, and ZYZZYVA, and he tweets @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/04/15/from-quantum-tunneling-devices-to-biomimetics-the-10-strangest-transports-in-non-driving-games/feed/4How Navigating the Louvre with a Nintendo 3DS Made Me Rethink the Future of Gaming, Art, and Virtual Realityhttps://www.tor.com/2015/03/27/how-navigating-the-louvre-with-a-nintendo-3ds-made-me-rethink-the-future-of-gaming-art-and-virtual-reality/
https://www.tor.com/2015/03/27/how-navigating-the-louvre-with-a-nintendo-3ds-made-me-rethink-the-future-of-gaming-art-and-virtual-reality/#commentsFri, 27 Mar 2015 17:15:00 +0000http://www.tor.com?p=170470&preview_id=170470The Louvre Museum in Paris is an architectural marvel, a palace built upon, renovated, and expanded from its origins as a fortress. Even awe would be an understatement to describe the feeling exploring its vast wings, its incredible Pyramide du Louvre, not to mention the most epic collection of artwork on display in the world. […]]]>

The Louvre Museum in Paris is an architectural marvel, a palace built upon, renovated, and expanded from its origins as a fortress. Even awe would be an understatement to describe the feeling exploring its vast wings, its incredible Pyramide du Louvre, not to mention the most epic collection of artwork on display in the world. The first time I visited, I got completely lost, in part, because it’s one of the world’s largest museums at over 652,000 square feet. In between trying to track down the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Egyptian antiquities, my legs gave out after a half a day of hapless wandering.

The second time I visited (which was almost ten years later), I had a much better experience, knowing exactly where I wanted to go, even getting a good grasp of its layout. This wasn’t the result of having learned my way around during my first visit, but rather because I had the official Nintendo DS Louvre Guide to lead me, complete with a GPS and 3D Imaging designed specifically for the museum (on rent for just five Euros at any of the booths).

My perceptions were more attuned with gaming than I’d realized, where spatial relationships in the real world were more intuitive rendered through the map on the 3DS. The Whorfian Hypothesis on cognitive development describes how language shapes our perceptions. Whether subconscious or not, I was relating to the visual language of gaming in a way that was surprisingly familiar, particularly in terms of the way I interfaced with the museum. The 3DS Guide made my experience not only more manageable, but (and I feel a little silly saying this in retrospect) it made the whole Louvre resemble a Zeldaesque labyrinth ready to be explored.

A couple years back, there was all the hoopla from critics stating that gaming could never be considered art. Even if I found the statement uninformed—all it took was just a peek at some of the galleries of concept art behind the games I’d worked on to convince me otherwise, not to mention the talented artists behind them—the incorporation of a game into the Louvre experience was especially surprising as I considered it a cultural bastion impervious to the sway of gaming. When I first saw tourists carrying the 3DS around the museum, a part of me felt annoyed that they couldn’t put away their gaming console for one day (‘What’d you do and see at the Louvre?’ ‘I leveled up my The World Ends With You character.’). When I found out its actual purpose, not only was I intrigued, but it got me thinking about my own prejudices about what the traditional museum experience entailed.

As the official guide of the Louvre, the “game” contains more than 600 photographs, 30+ hours of audio commentary, and “high resolution images, 3D models and video commentaries” about the artwork. That means you can zoom in on the details of the paintings, the digital magnifying glass focusing on background images via your screen. You can rotate and spin around sculptures from different angles (like above), all to the tune of a narrator informing you of a work’s history, significance, and interesting trivia. Rather than clash or even supplant the artwork, the 3DS increased my appreciation, visually pointing out specific approaches employed by the artist I would never have known about otherwise. The option to analyze or maximize any painting is invaluable, particularly on the large-scale images. You can search out favorite pieces and mark them on your map, which will then show you the quickest way there. It’s convenient being able to track your position on the 3D map and plan out your entire journey, especially because of how huge the grounds are.

There are limitations to the game; it doesn’t cover every exhibit, though they incorporate software updates as well as analyze user data and give feedback to the museum they can use to optimize and improve future visits. It also doesn’t take questions, and while it comes in several different languages, it lacks a Mandarin version, a feature many of my acquaintances bemoaned. Finally, the GPS isn’t perfect, and from time to time, it’ll get confused about your next destination.

These complaints are rather trivial considering it’s still far more convenient than any app, audio tour, and paper map I’ve used at other museums because of the way the 3DS integrates audio, visual, and tactile control into one package. It’s as close to getting a human guide as you can get without actually having one, but with the added benefit that you can travel at your own leisure, go off the beaten path, and stay in one location for as long or as briefly as you want. I’ve often felt like a herded sheep in tour groups, hitting bullet points on an unseen list, rather than being able to explore the more obscure and stranger pieces on display.

As I’ve mentioned, the Louvre is massive, and it’s both awe-inspiring and overwhelming being surrounded by masterpieces like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People or David’s Coronation of Napoleon. The collection never seems to end and I felt like I could have spent a week there and still not appreciated more than a quarter of it. Many castles, just by their grand nature, are designed to make you feel insignificant, particularly in this instance. You’re in the presence of the king. Kneel, fool.

The 3DS was an equalizer and it felt like I was wielding my own personal tricorder (all it needed was a sensor beam). It helped tabulate the enormous gallery so that I could focus on the works on display, from the profound to the more playful.

I can’t think of anyone better to have created the Louvre Guide than Nintendo, the makers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Ocarina was my first real introduction to an immersive 3D environment (even more so than Super Mario Bros. 64 and Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation) and a huge part of that was because of the way it naturally adapted the 2D sprites I’d grown up with into a space that was not only traversable, but became as important a character as the main protagonist. The world was a puzzle to be unraveled and the additional dimension breathed an authenticity into the architecture that holds up to this day. The Deku Tree level was a revelation for me, and gaming space was changed irreversibly once I’d finished. I’ve heard stories about Shigeru Miyamoto’s intuitive grasp of camera and player controls, his dedication to perfecting the user experience.

For me, art is platform agnostic and can find expression in any medium, as long as it gives me a different understanding of the world, independent of whether I agree or disagree. Art in gaming isn’t just limited to the visual, but includes gameplay, design, and sound as well, all working in conjunction to create a unique experience. I still remember the sense of wonder at the Deku Tree level as I uncovered each of its secrets, all the way to the climactic plunge which was the coda to a brilliant level. In the same way, the 3DS creates a sense that each work in the Louvre is a puzzle, exhibitions with unique origins where even a dash of paint or a hint of a smile can have revolutionary implications based on the context in which it was created. This isn’t just art in a stuffy setting, only understood by the connoisseur, but something vibrant, exhilarating, and accessible. Ensconced in an interface familiar to gamers, the 3DS guide broadens the audience in a way that combines the favorite pastimes of the past with the present—as evidenced by many of the kids wielding their 3DS’s in front of classical paintings.

Nintendo’s creativity and consideration of the user experience in the 3DS Louvre Guide is what makes this seemingly quirky pairing work so well—so much so that a few weeks later, when I visited the Vatican Museum, I got lost, unable to find many of the exhibits I wanted to. I longed for a corresponding 3DS guide and found the accompanying audio tour primitive in comparison.

The only thing holding the experience back from being seamless was the fact that the 3DS was a separate object that I held and had to constantly refer back to.

This, of course, got me thinking about virtual reality and its significance for art. VR promises perfect immersion, but there’s also gear designed to augment reality. I tried out the Oculus Rift at Siggraph a few years back and even in its early stages, its potential for immersion held a ton of promise. With Microsoft, Sony, Valve, Google, and Facebook working on their own gear, each with their own distinct take, I couldn’t help but wonder specifically what it signified for the future of art. I’ve spent a lot of time playing with the Unreal engine, which is what some of these kits are using in their creation of their 3D worlds, and some of the better demos don’t just look indistinguishable from real life, but even more graphic. The duller palettes of actual cities seem muted in comparison to the vibrancy of art-directed worlds teeming with refractions, perfect sunsets, global illumination, and the complexity of a polygonal metropolis.

Will there one day be a virtual Louvre you can visit in your living room? Every work of art, every sculpture, even the hallways replicated with impeccable verisimilitude? No noisy tourists and no need to exhaust yourself finding a specific work of art (unless you wanted to). I realize it’s not the same as actually going (there are all the intangibles of traveling) and even in Star Trek, Captain Sisko wistfully notes that a holodeck baseball game isn’t a substitute for the real thing. I don’t want the virtual to replace the real and make the world a matrix-like MMORPG, and even if I did in other instances, that’s beyond the scope of this piece. What I’m more focused on is how a collaboration would work, the virtual gear functioning as an easel to paint even more fantastic landscapes than either could conceive of by themselves.

One practical example where this would have been very helpful is the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican Museum. It’s gorgeous, but hard to see from almost sixty feet below, even though Michelangelo intentionally used bright colors to make them more visible. I had a hard time enjoying my time there as I’d forgotten to bring my glasses and the chapel was packed to the brim with tourists, all pushing and tugging against each other. Imagine if you could use the virtual gear to zoom your view into the ceiling, visually gorging on the frescoes from below, swinging the camera around, actually seeing the stories in each character, the way they interconnect the Great Flood with the Garden of Eden and so on. Unlike a binocular, constrained to your location, this could actually let you see every detail up close. Goethe once said, “Without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what man is capable of achieving.” But the truth is, when we actually get there, the most we’ll see are general outlines that we try to decipher in the cacophony of the Biblical panoply.

I hope the 3DS Louvre Guide is a preview of the type of hybridization that will become more and more commonplace. The fusing of the real and unreal to create something innovative but familiar is going to change the artistic experience. Into what? That’s an exciting prospect to ponder.

While in Paris, I imbibed of some of Sartre’s work at a cafe (with a croissant and hot chocolate milk) and one of the passages that struck me were his musings on imagination and feeling:

“When the feeling is oriented toward something real, actually perceived, the thing, like a reflector, returns the light it has received from it. As a result of this continual interaction, the feeling is continually enriched at the same time as the object soaks up affective qualities. The feeling thus obtains its own particular depth and richness. The affective states follows the progress of attention, it develops with each new discovery of perception, it assimilates all the features of the object; as a result its development is unpredictable, since it is subordinate to the development of its real correlative, even while it remains spontaneous. At each moment perception overflows it and sustains it, and its density and depth come from its being confused with the perceived object; each affective quality is so deeply incorporated in the object that it is impossible to distinguish between what is felt and what is perceived. In the constitution of the unreal object, knowledge plays the role of perception; it is with it that the feeling is incorporated. Thus the unreal object emerges.”

I can’t wait to see what emerges in the years to come.

Peter Tieryas is a character artist who has worked on films like Guardians of the Galaxy, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, and Alice in Wonderland. His novel, Bald New World, was listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books as well as Publisher Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of Summer 2014. His writing has been published in places like Kotaku, Kyoto Journal, Tor.com, Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, and ZYZZYVA, and he tweets @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/03/27/how-navigating-the-louvre-with-a-nintendo-3ds-made-me-rethink-the-future-of-gaming-art-and-virtual-reality/feed/3What’s the Point of an RPG Without a Main Villain? How Ultima IV Changed the Gamehttps://www.tor.com/2015/03/18/whats-the-point-of-an-rpg-without-a-main-villain-how-ultima-iv-changed-the-game/
https://www.tor.com/2015/03/18/whats-the-point-of-an-rpg-without-a-main-villain-how-ultima-iv-changed-the-game/#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 14:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com?p=169052&preview_id=169052Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (QOTA) is an open world RPG in which the main goal is to be a good person. There’s no archvillain to defeat (Mondain, Minax, and Exodus have already been vanquished), no world that needs saving, not even a prince or princess to rescue. This was unlike any of the […]]]>

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (QOTA) is an open world RPG in which the main goal is to be a good person. There’s no archvillain to defeat (Mondain, Minax, and Exodus have already been vanquished), no world that needs saving, not even a prince or princess to rescue. This was unlike any of the RPGs of the time, a narrative device that even now seems revolutionary. I can’t imagine a book, film, or TV series without a principal foe—what would the story arc even be like? In QOTA, you help people, meditate, explore Britannia, and focus on self-enlightenment.

Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series, considers this to be among his favorites, and I personally think it’s one of the best games ever developed. Garriott has stated QOTA was designed in response to the angry letters of parents, outraged by the immoral behavior of the previous Ultima games. There was also heavy criticism being hurled at D&D in general, stating it was a bad influence, demonic corruptor of youth, and worse (a topic I’ll come back to later). Instead of making another Ultima in which you would pillage, kill, and do whatever you needed to find another key or treasure, Garriott decided you should strive to become a “good” person. Inspired by Eastern religions, Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, and The Wizard of Oz, Garriott wanted role-playing to be about more than just killing monsters and hunting treasures.

After the world is unified by Lord British, he’s concerned about the spiritual welfare of his people. He wants someone to step forward, be a paragon of virtues to guide their daily lives, and descend into the Stygian Abyss to learn the ultimate meaning of life through the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. That’s where you enter.

The path to becoming an avatar was split up into eight separate virtues, and in keeping with the open nature and loose structure of the game, I’ll explore each of them individually, examining what they meant for me.

Honesty

I did not actually play the original Ultima IV on the PC, but rather the Nintendo port developed by Pony Canyon and published by FCI in 1990 (the original PC version came out in 1985). The graphics were redone with sprites reminiscent of JRPGs like Sweet Home, and it also helped that the gameplay and controls were streamlined to make the experience more intuitive.

One of the first virtues players were faced with was honesty, and it became clear from the opening character creation screen that this game was very different. Rather than the typical assigning and populating of random stats, QOTA began with something akin to a personality test. You had to ponder ethical dilemmas and the tarot-like structure was determined by moral choices. These decisions weren’t simply a matter of good and evil, but rather questions like what do you value more, honesty or justice? Your ethical preferences determined your destiny.

As Richard Garriott stated in a Facebook essay about Quest of the Avatar: “In theory playing a role playing game as Conan the Barbarian is fine, but your success should be judged on how well you embody the beliefs of Conan. In Grand Theft Auto, you should be judged on how good of a thug you are. Since my story was intended to be the story of YOUR PERSONAL evolution as a person, it was important that you were you, not someone else!”

The way you conduct yourself is as important as your final goal. Take for example the blind shop vendors for magical recipes (reagents). Whenever you buy something from them, they’ll ask you to count out the money and pay them the right sum. You could scam them, leaving one coin instead of the hundreds you owe. But then your honesty takes a hit. I honestly felt guilty for scamming the blind shopkeeper to stock up on my magic spells, even though I did it every time.

Compassion

Role-playing games have a long history and their roots lie in war simulations like kriegsspiel which was used by German and Prussian officers to train for battle. Before Gary Gygax developed D&D, he made a war game in a medieval setting called Chainmail. Fantasy elements were later incorporated, and it would evolve into the first iteration of D&D. It makes sense, then, that many of the early RPG games were about combat and fighting, often struggling against an ominous enemy force.

Similar to the leap D&D made by fusing history with wizardry, QOTA represents an evolution that melded role-playing with deeper narratives, a move that resonated with gamers seeking deeper stories and issues. What do you if you’ve already defeated your hundredth dragon, your thousandth ogre army? Quandaries expanded from worrying about which enemies you needed to defeat, to how to handle issues like poverty with compassion.

The homeless and the sick exist in most of the towns of Britannia. One of them is dying of bubonic plague and looks so pitiful as he begs for money. No matter how much money you give him, he’s still there every day. I know playing it in retrospect, the mechanic seems simple, but back then as a kid, the chance to give to the poor was my naive way of feeling like I was actually helping people. QOTA made me wonder how, with all this prosperity in the land, there were still so many who had so little. It was a dark reflection on a reality that’s still apparent today, beyond our front doors.

Valor

What’s most daunting about QOTA is that you can do anything in any order you want, recruit, or not recruit, party members as you please. You make up the narrative and you determine the course of your journey, engendering a sense of immersion that had the effect of making you feel like you were in more control than any previous RPG. There’s so much to do and gather, from the colored stones to the runes of virtue, it can be overwhelming. You can use the moongates, hijack a ship and sail the seas, and even ride an air balloon to reach obscure destinations.

Combat is grid-based and probably the weakest link of the game. If you don’t have projectile weapons, you have to move all the way to confront the enemy, which quickly becomes a chore. It’s even more painful in sea battles where you’re on boat and the enemies are in the ocean where they can lunge fireballs at you from a distance. Valor dictates that you never run away from battle, no matter how weak you are. I had to fight a lot of battles just to prove I wasn’t a coward.

Still, there were some cool mechanics present that weren’t common among RPGs. First off, there’s an “auto” option that lets the computer automatically act for you during battle. Also, you can fight anyone, including the villagers and even Lord British. Decades before Grand Theft Auto let you kill civilians, Ultima gave you that same option.

As an odd and happy coincidence, valor was embodied in QOTA by a character named Geoff. The blue-armored knight was usually my fighter of choice as I gathered my party, and my second member was a druid named Jaana who represented justice. In real life, one of my closest friends is named Geoff and his wife is Jana. I didn’t even realize it until I replayed the game for this article, and it was a cool moment of synchronicity considering I spent hundreds of hours with these characters a decade before I’d meet either of them.

Justice (A Personal Aside)

I understand Garriott’s motivations for creating the game, stemming back to my high school years. I had a close friend who shared my interest in RPGs and fantasy books. He recommended the Dragonlance series to me as well as several other novels that remain among my favorites. One day, he told me he was no longer allowed to read fantasy books or play RPGs. He warned me that I shouldn’t either as they were “evil.” His pastor had told him magic in books and games questioned the power of God, and that they were a conduit for satanic forces. He felt guilty that he’d been as exposed to them as he had.

I was incredulous, wondering if he was serious. He urged me to give them up and when I refused, he stopped talking to me. I could not understand how imagination, creativity, and fighting evil to help people could ever be considered wrong. An older me understands the politics of it; attention grabbers accuse the said target of immorality, raising up their own status while detracting from bigger issues (Garriott would explore the corruption of religion in the sequel). A younger me did not, and I felt a strong sense of injustice that not only was something we both loved being threatened, but that I’d lost a friend in the process.

Even now, it disturbs me how divisive morality can be when misused, and more terrifying, how capricious its standards are. There was something reassuring in the morality of QOTA, where companions remained steadfast through adversity and you weren’t branded a heretic or sinner for simply enjoying a videogame.

Humility

Fortunately, QOTA rarely feels unfair, doing a great job balancing the battles so that your focus can be on exploration (even death has minimal impact). Britannia felt vibrant, dynamic, and alive. I can’t think of an 8-bit world that was quite as massive.

Each of the towns had a distinctive feel, represented by their virtue: humility’s Magincia is filled with monsters destroyed by their past pride; the Buccaneer’s Den is full of raucous pirates; and justice’s Yew is home to the high court of the land. Before then, most games I’d played had generic villages that blended into one another. Even in NES games I loved like Zelda II, Final Fantasy, Crystalis, Willow, and Dragon Warrior, the majority of the villagers were only there to initiate fetch quests or tell you how to get to your next destination (if they weren’t just being downright obscure).

In QOTA, your interactions actually affect your character stats, and your relationships matter. There was a quantified method to the madness, each virtue having a counter that would change depending on your actions. But as that number is never visible to the player, I had no idea they were even calculating it, making the system feel organic. It helps that almost everyone has something useful to say and while the boastful replies you could give in the PC version weren’t present, there were other types of questions that would affect the way NPCs responded to you.

Adding to the sense of wonder was the fact that you were required to search places you’d normally never visit including a prison, poison swamps, and a fiery forge (burning yourself in the process). A trio of volcanoes even hid the deadliest item in the game, a skull that would induce the Apocalypse. Learning the humility to explore every location, no matter how lowly or obscure, was an essential trait in becoming the avatar.

Honor

In contrast to the Grand Theft Auto games, which are a brilliant canvas for destruction and villainy, QOTA was a sandbox devoted to morality and character development. Garriott stated in an interview with the Ultima Codex that:

“What makes an Ultima an Ultima was not the individual, specific character, the name of an NPC, or the name of the game. What made an Ultima an Ultima was the detailed storycrafting, and the care to create those backstories, and the care to create socially relevant events to you, and to do that psychoanalysis of you during gameplay.”

That psychoanalysis is best manifested in the labyrinthine dungeons. The vast network of seven underground areas are connected through three altar rooms and it was a struggle finding the necessary stones. But if you kept at it, you’d stumble your way into underground shrines protected by strange guardians who’d question you. Honor was one of those virtues that was tougher to pin down, especially as enemies rarely fled like they did in the PC version. But there was honor in questing and sticking with the journey. The whole world was connected by the respective altars of Truth, Love, and Courage, a fitting allegory for the way the virtues seeped into one another. It’s not a complex ethical system, but there was something visually gratifying seeing that love, truth, and courage bridging all these disparate parts.

Sacrifice

I know persistence isn’t one of the official virtues the game encourages, but it should be. You’ll need to sacrifice a lot of your time if you want to beat this game. Looking back all these years later, I couldn’t help but wonder, how in the world did I ever finish it as a kid? Some of the puzzles are obscure to say the least, and the dungeons, even with the help of FAQs, are extremely difficult to navigate.

Fortunately, the developers gave you a few tools, the most helpful being one of the best manuals ever included with a game. There’s detailed maps of the towns, magic ingredient lists, and a description of the moongates. The PC’s opening cutscene that was stripped away on the NES version is present in the manual, and the map included was a godsend. I pored over both for days on end. These were the kinds of manuals that inspired me to write game manuals when I grew up.

I always thought it funny that it was not enough of a sacrifice to save the world, fight off monsters, and help the weak. You needed to donate blood at the donor bank, too. Once you sacrifice enough blood and fulfill all your other duties, you achieve avatarhood and descend down into the Stygian Abyss. There, you’ll fight against some of the toughest enemies in the game, including the final battle pitting you against pixelated reflections of you and your companions. Being a messiah meant you had to destroy the eight embodiments of your 8-bit soul. It wasn’t a tough battle (especially with the Tremor spell), but a poetic one that culminated in sacrifice. You would never be the same again.

I’m grateful that the original PC version is free on GOG, but it retains the old graphics and keyboard interface. If you want to play QOTA with RPG sensibilities that are somewhat grounded in familiar gameplay mechanics, the NES version is the way to go.

Conclusion: Spirituality

I’ve read that meditating every day for thirty minutes increases your lifespan. Achieving avatarhood isn’t just about performing good deeds, but reflecting on them and meditating on their implications. I’ve often wondered why I loved this game so much. One big reason is the underrated soundtrack, which has some of the best music around on the Nintendo. But it was also because it represented a different type of ideal, forcing me to rethink my view of the world while also expanding the possibilities of gameplay and story. What was the future of RPGs? The fact that I didn’t know the answer, that the potential seemed limitless, was very exciting to me.

In the end sequence, Lord British challenges you by stating, “The quest of the avatar is forever.”

All these years later, I’m still striving, still hoping to live up to its ideals.

Peter Tieryas is a character artist who has worked on films like Guardians of the Galaxy, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, and Alice in Wonderland. His novel, Bald New World, was listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books as well as Publisher Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of Summer 2014. His writing has been published in places like Kotaku, Kyoto Journal, Tor.com, Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, and ZYZZYVA, and he blogs at tieryas.wordpress.com and tweets @TieryasXu.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/03/18/whats-the-point-of-an-rpg-without-a-main-villain-how-ultima-iv-changed-the-game/feed/14On Iain M. Banks and the Video Game that Inspired Excessionhttps://www.tor.com/2015/03/06/on-iain-m-banks-and-the-video-game-that-inspired-excession-sid-meier-civilization/
https://www.tor.com/2015/03/06/on-iain-m-banks-and-the-video-game-that-inspired-excession-sid-meier-civilization/#commentsFri, 06 Mar 2015 14:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com?p=167917&preview_id=167917Sid Meier’s Civilization was one of the most addicting games of my life. I feel like I could have learned several new programming languages in the weeks and months I spent building pixelated empires, warring with foreign nations, pursuing brand new technology, and losing everything in an inferno of digital destruction. I was pleasantly surprised […]]]>

Sid Meier’s Civilization was one of the most addicting games of my life. I feel like I could have learned several new programming languages in the weeks and months I spent building pixelated empires, warring with foreign nations, pursuing brand new technology, and losing everything in an inferno of digital destruction. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Iain M. Banks shared the addiction and that his Culture novel Excession was in part inspired by it. In an interview with SFX Magazines, Banks said:

“Inventing a world where you have different laws of physics, that would be about the ultimate version of Civilization. That’s part of where the idea of Outside Context Problems came from, you’re getting along really well and then this great battleship comes steaming in and you think, well my wooden sailing ships are never going to be able to deal with that. But when I started Excession I deleted Civilization off my hard drive.”

Excession is one of my favorite Culture books and I loved the way it focused on the Minds and the mystery behind the excession itself. The humans, though, seemed like they were tacked on, unnecessary accessories that distracted from the main attraction (I especially struggled with Ulver Seich, who threw a fit for not being able to bring her furry pets on a mission for Special Circumstance). It was only when I viewed them from the context of Civilization that the book took on an entirely different meaning.

Outside Context Problem

Civilization was developed by MicroProse and the original DOS version was released in 1991 (the screenshots in this article are from the Super Nintendo version though the gameplay is more or less identical). Designed by Sid Meier, it was an evolution of his earlier game, Rail Tycoon, that also incorporated elements of the board game with the same name, Civilization. In essence, you begin at the dawn of humanity, take a group of settlers, build an empire, and engage in turn-based strategy that can best be summed up in the 4X philosophy: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Civ, as people often called it, sucked away countless hours of my life. I was always trying to take one extra move, conquer one more city, and buy an additional building. That additional turn quickly became a whole evening and often seeped into the early morning. Creating another road, setting up irrigation, chasing after the wheel so I could create an army of chariots, moving another pair of units on a trireme while keeping it close to land, dispatching soldiers to take care of a landing party of barbarians, and carefully navigating my way around an alliance with the Egyptians was all part of the campaign. Alternative histories never had so many alternatives. In one timeline, the Roman Empire never fell and lasted until the space age. In another, the Aztecs built atomic bombs.

I first heard about the game from friends who regaled me with stories of their global conquests. Everyone had a different story, a narrative complete with arc, twist, and denouement. It was like a childhood Chautauqua, kids gathering around and swapping Civ stories, tips, and tragedies. My imagination ran wild as I heard about the wily AI, the race for arms, the espionage and all-out combat. I have to admit, I was somewhat disappointed when I first saw the graphics as they were so basic compared to everything I’d conjured in my head. Ironically, the primitive graphics ended up working better because they served as symbols rather than literal interpretations of the forces at work, spurring my imagination as it had my friends. Meier was said to have made it more heavily text based in initial versions, but went back to a more graphic gameplay because it was more entertaining.

Civ taught me the basics of nation building through practical application in a way most history books could only scratch at. Cities would thrive based on location, proximity to bodies of water, and the infrastructure. They couldn’t grow beyond a certain limit without aqueducts in place, but the people also needed entertainment in the form of a colosseum and a temple in order to be happy. Revolutions changed governments, I stomped out rebellions using my military, and often went to war against foreign nations even if my people did not wish it. Depending on the difficulty level I chose, one of the toughest parts of the game was when I’d spend hours building a civilization, connecting the cities together, trying to guide it into a new age, then have enemy ships arrive with militia men and guns. My swords and spears were no match for them and I’d reluctantly wave the flag, acknowledging it was time to restart.

Everything in Civ is on the macroscopic level. But I got to thinking, what if I actually could know the ramifications of my actions and the impact they had at the individual level? What if my decision to attack Macedonia instead of honoring the peace I’d agreed to actually led to the death of soldiers with families? What if at the moment when my entire civilization was exterminated, I had to feel their individual pain?

As much as Excession was about the anomaly, it was also about a Mind, the Sleeper Service, who felt guilty for one of the decisions it made on a galactic version of Civilization. It was that realization that led me to me rethink the entire book.

The Land of Infinite Fun

One of the most fascinating ideas in Excession involves a game the Minds play with themselves called metamathics. They “imagined entirely new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions for life, sometimes just letting things run to see if it would arise spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complication were enabled.”

Part of the joy of Excession is hearing the Minds speak with each other, that matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee. The Minds are generally a benevolent force, calculating and prancing through the complexities of intergalactic politics. Each has a distinctive personality, their own codes and quirks they abide by (I refrain from saying “eccentricities,” as Eccentrics are a class all to their own in the Culture). The rapid communication exchanges are triggered by the discovery of a “dead star that was at least fifty times older than the universe” that could potentially give them “an entire universe” that “would be yours alone. In fact, go back far enough-that is, to a small enough, early enough, just-post-singularity universe-and you could, conceivably, customize it; mold it, shape it, influence its primary characteristics.” It’s like the ultimate game of Civilization Banks’ referred to in his interview.

The novel has a frenetic pace, jumping through multiple sides like a turn-based strategy game. The Elench, the horrible Affront who take pleasure in inflicting pain (“Progress through pain” being their creed), the Minds, and Dajeil and Genar-Hofoen each take a turn. On my initial read, I didn’t find Dajeil and Genar’s relationship as compelling or interesting as the individuals in some of the other Culture books like Player of Games and Use of Weapons, especially as their romance was based almost solely on physical attraction. Considering that everyone in the Culture can gland and change their appearances, that fact amplified the shallowness of their bond. The pair felt like excess in a story packed to the brim with intrigue and universe-shattering possibilities. Genar cheated on her in the past, resulting in a violent breakup in which Dajeil attacked Genar. Afterwards, Dajeil withdrew from society and put her pregnancy on indefinite hold. The Sleeper Service felt responsible for their fallout, and many of the actions it undertakes in the book are its way of atoning for its choices. As it states: “Sometimes you take a hand in such stories, such fates. Sometimes you know or anticipate the extent to which your intervention will matter, but on other occasions you don’t know and can’t guess. You find that some chance remark you’ve made has affected somebody’s life profoundly or that some seemingly insignificant decision you’ve come to has had profound and lasting consequences.”

The Sleeper Service feels culpable for its choice on a level most other Minds would barely countenance, and one players of Civ surely never would. Towards the end, when it actually helps unite the two for a brief moment, it’s a strangely haunting sequence that reminded me that the AIs of the Culture are often more human than the humans themselves. It also helped me to realize that the personalities of the humans weren’t as key to the book as the emotional OCP it posed for the Sleeper Service. Genar and Dajeil’s arc isn’t convincing (I won’t even get into Ulver here), but that’s unimportant. It’s Sleeper Service who awakens, Sleeper Service who has to make its peace with its past.

The book wraps as the Excession reacts defensively to the Culture forces until the Sleeper Service ends up transmitting a copy of its mindstate to the Excession. As both the Sleeper Service and Dajeil were previously frozen (the former in gestation for Special Circumstance and the latter in pregnancy), the Excession too was in waiting. Unlike Sleeper Service, who tries to help resolve the issue for Dajeil, the Outside Context Problem is resolved by the awareness that the Culture is not ready for whatever it is the Excession was going to provide. It leaves peacefully.

Enemies in Civ tend to be a lot less forgiving.

The Interesting Times Gang

These are, of course, just some of my speculations. Often, as these things go, it’s easier to connect the dots after the fact even if the correlation at the actual moment of execution was minimal. As one of the Minds points out: “The closer one looks into anything the more coincidences one finds, perfectly innocent though they may be.”

I loved Excession on so many levels, and the admiration has grown with a third reading. There are literally paragraphs thrown in as background detail that could make for amazing novels of their own. If I were to get into a deeper discussion of what I enjoyed so much about it, I would go on forever, so I’ve limited myself to the connections between the book and the game. I only have two Culture books left (Hydrogen Sonata and Surface Detail) and I’m trying not to rush in reading them. But the interplay of the Minds is something I hope I’ll get to see again before my time in the Culture universe is complete. One thing Civilization made me rethink was my stance on time, seeing it more from the Mind’s perspective. In Excession, the conspiracy to rid the Culture of the Affront was hundreds of years in the making, beginning with the bait of Pittance around the time of the Idiran War. It might seem a long time, but in Civ, a few hundred years is nothing in the grand scope of things and I’ll often plan things out centuries before they happen. I’ve wondered what it would be like if my perception of time was as broad as a Civ interface…

Both Civilization and Excession are fantastic works, and their intersection, whatever its extent, goes to show how powerful gaming can be. It’s not just fiction influencing gaming, but vice versa. With all the recent trends pointing towards an explosion of virtual reality, my question is, when is someone going to make a metamatics simulator, a chance to recreate and play Civilization with the whole universe? I credit Excession for forcing me to ask from the outset: what are the ethics behind it? What are the moral ramifications?

Peter Tieryas is a character artist who has worked on The Good Dinosaur, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. His novel, Bald New World, was listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books as well as Publisher Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of Summer 2014. His writing has been published in places like Kotaku, Kyoto Journal, and ZYZZYVA, and he blogs at tieryas.wordpress.com and tweets @TieryasXu.